


The Long Way Around

by LadyShockbox



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Beast Machines, Transformers: Beast Wars
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Canon Divergence, M/M, Romance, Short Story Anthology, no one in beast machines generally has a good time but by god do these idiots try
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:42:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 32,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27688459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyShockbox/pseuds/LadyShockbox
Summary: Megatron decimated Cybertron before the events of Beast Machines, leaving it a lonely place in the heart of the Spark War. Thankfully, things are a little less desolate with half-decent company… and Thrust and Jetstorm at least have each other covered in that department. A short story collection. Some stories are closed, some connect to larger plots. Some border canonical, some wildly deviate into the unknown. Sometimes, Blackarachnia and the Maximals show up. Thrust/Jetstorm.
Relationships: Blackarachnia/Thrust, Jetstorm/Thrust
Comments: 7
Kudos: 10





	1. The Long Way Around

**Author's Note:**

> In “Stakeout” (also posted on AO3), the author Hambone indicates in the notes that they cannot believe they are one of the only people to write about these clowns, and that people should step it up.
> 
> This entire collection is more like a long fall down flight of stairs, but any step for these idiots is still a step in the right direction. Ups and downs included, with all the emotional buffaloing in-between. 
> 
> Relevant warnings will be listed chapter-by-chapter. 
> 
> With the exception of a few stories that are made to be part of a larger narrative (by referring back to each other in some way), most of these are largely self-contained and do not need to be read in any particular order. All you really need to “remember” going into this is that no matter what universe they are part of, Thrust and Jetstorm pretty much only share one (1) brain cell between them. Who happens to have the larger percentage of that cell is up for debate. The answer isn't always as obvious as it seems.
> 
> Feedback is welcome and will stoke the fires for future collections, as well as the other Thrust/Jetstorm project I have going on in the background. Don’t worry about it. Yeah. It’s fine.
> 
> Have fun taking The Long Way Around.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We tell stories, build  
> from fragments of our lives  
> maps to guide us to each other.  
> We make collages of the way  
> it might have been  
> had it been as we remembered,  
> as we think perhaps it was,  
> tallying in our middle age  
> diminishing returns...
> 
> I said someone I loved who died  
> told me in a dream  
> to not be lonely, told me  
> not to ever be afraid...
> 
> It’s what we love the most  
> can make us most afraid, can make us  
> for the first time understand  
> how we are rocking in a dark boat on the water,  
> taking the long way home.
> 
> — Pat Schneider (6/1/1934 - 8/10/2020), "Going Home The Longest Way Around"

“What now, biker boy?”

Thrust followed the length of the wall with his arms raised. He hesitated as he rolled to a stop and stared into the dark. Then, the safety in his servo turrets snapped off with resounding twin clicks.

_“Well?”_

“Take the long way around,” Thrust answered. His voice reverberated against the concrete— the sound of metal raking over smouldering coals. “I’ll drive them straight to you.”

Their most recent attempt at a Mange Menagerie roundup took them deep into the lower districts of Cybertropolis. Laid out beneath the towering skyscrapers and a stretch of the mega-freeway that fed the Citadel. This was a seedier section of the city that interlaced with weaving alleyways and pushed into a maze of backstreets. It had the smell to match, too. An abysmal runoff of grime and gunge choked the already thin air with its fumes, fermented by sewer water bubbling to the surface streets. The recent acid rains had made the resulting haze even worse. Cold, plunging the metal valley of decayed apartments into a dense fog. Visibility was next to zero after more than three feet in the corrosive mist. Relocation signage bolted to the wall next to him told a pressing story… Maximal officials had been trying to evict the Predacon tenants for months. Something about levelling the place to build up luxury apartments. Which was a shame, because he was sure it _still_ would have smelled like slag after the fact.

 _Their_ Maximals had vanished at the throat of the labyrinth with nothing more for the Vehicon generals to go on. No drones were coming to their aid, either. Radio communications were impossible with half the relays across the city choked into submission from the storm. Their drone-control synapses were also offline, by extension. The narrow lanes were at least awash in neon from the fluorescent signage above. They were the prettiest of the city’s lights that refracted on the wet asphalt, turning the dark haze into a clash of rainbow hues.

Jetstorm loved it second only to the skies— if only from a distance. You wouldn’t catch him dead wandering a filthy gutter like some _rat_. One Maximal fitting the description was enough too many. “The long way around _where?”_

Thrust mulled over his thoughts before giving the answer. “The river. Any one of those maintenance entrances to the sewers will have a direct line to the Catacombs. I’ll flush ‘em out, you take ‘em out.”

“Aerial poaching? Sounds like a blood sport.” Jetstorm rose to an elevated hover, brandishing his talons outward. His weapons array whined as it came to life. “I _love_ blood sports, biker boy.”

Thrust took the low road, disappearing into the brume that swallowed his energy signature whole. Straight down a gullet of a multicolored water painting, until even his headlamp light vanished. Jetstorm went high and took the long way around as agreed on. Cutting straight ahead over the dilapidated buildings, bowing far enough to the side to avoid drawing attention to himself. The winding web of pathways between the buildings fed straight to the river swollen by the rain. The floodgates had already opened to divert water accordingly. A powerful current lashed the concrete barricades.

Jetstorm hung at the entrance of the most direct path with his antigravs hissing. He waited. And waited.

He never would have noticed the Maximals sneaking by thirty cycles later if Nightscream hadn’t slipped and shouted. The resounding slap of wet fur on asphalt was also hard to miss. The bat wasn’t exactly made for walking in his beast-mode… Jetstorm turned, and found himself practically face-to-snout with _all five Maximals_ trying to skirt past. A brief exchange of weapons fire left Jetstorm scrambling to avoid Primal’s energy pulses. Two on five hardly sounded fair, but Jetstorm and Thrust — together — would have been able to hold their own. _One_ on five after being effectively snuck up on had dealt the aerial Vehicon an unwinnable situation. The blue mech was forced to back off. Adding insult to injury, he watched with seething anger as the Maximals made their escape across one of the maintenance bridges. Not a single one of them fell in and drowned. Typical.

To say he was upset was a sheer goddamn understatement.

 _“Son of a glitch!”_ Jetstorm turned his head into the alley and shouted down its mouth. The force of it caused his vocalizer to bubble with static. “Roller boy! What the frag was _that_ about!? I almost got slagged out here!”

There was no answer. The haze churned down the darkened corridor, black and red that blended on green at its fringe. His voice echoed down and was met with ominous silence. The sound of it was warped by the time it finally bounced back to him.

Jetstorm tried his radio. “Thrust?”

Nothing.

Jetstorm scoured the alleys from above as best he could. The chemical vapor was still too thick to see through and had actually managed to get _worse_ in the time he spent waiting by the river. Visibility was down to twelve inches— maybe less. Too many of his instruments were being skewed to do proper measurements. Any reliance on radar was shot without a baseline to differentiate between the structures and a single lost mech. Short-wave pings were useless, too. He almost struck the side of one of the taller buildings as he went around in circles and lost his sense of direction. Jetstorm tried shouting again. He was remiss to realize that fog was muting him too much for the sound to carry.

_“Thrust!”_

There were no alternatives left. He finally descended into the labyrinth and felt _worse_ than a rat. Rats were at least hard-pressed to instinctually know their way around in the dark, but Jetstorm felt… something. Not _helpless_ (certainly not, not at all) but the word lingered in his processing cortex with a twinge of menace. Twice, he had to exit back up into the sky to retrace “steps” as he got lost. Struggling to hone in on where Thrust could have wedged himself was drawing on increasingly worse thoughts on what might have happened. Maybe he was never going to find him. Maybe he needed to brace himself to find a body.

Eventually, Jetstorm looped back to where he first agreed to take the long way around. He brandished his claws and furiously gouged the wall to mark his place after three feet. Then another three feet. When his talons started to wear down, he dragged his armor along the wall to leave paint transfer. When it started to wear down to his surface-level sensors and _hurt_ , he tore one of the relocation plaques off the wall and used _that_ to scrape path markers. Sparks flew.

There were finally tire treads underfoot as the grime accumulated into a heavy layer on the ground. Deep enough for a robot to leave a noticeable trail. Jetstorm could have recognized Thrust’s tread-pattern anywhere and started following it, continuing to leave marks in the walls to keep tracking his progress. He went straight down the gradual decline heading northbound, all the way to _another_ narrow backstreet that fed into an even slimmer lane. There were signs of a struggle as the mire slicked amongst animal pawprints. Energon was sloshed on the wall.

He found Thrust leaning against a metal wall behind a dumpster, using both to keep his himself propped upright. Cheetor’s machetes had slashed his tire flat to the rim. He had also gored him deep through the chassis. Light from his borrowed spark radiated from the shattered chamber. The asphalt shimmered those deflected neon glares as energon pooled under his wheel. The maroon mech was holding his arms against his body to keep his battered fuel processor and shredded tubing from spilling out.

“Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea,” Thrust said when he spotted him. His vocalizer warbled, agonized, but still restrained as he attempted to rein in whatever semblance of control he had left. His optic sensors couldn’t quite keep Jetstorm in their focus as the visor's backlight flickered. Poor power allocation must have left him fading in and out of consciousness. The hot coals in his voice were doused. “How about we take the short way out?”

There was no carrying Thrust up and out in that condition. Jetstorm settled for the next best thing and lowered himself down to the other mech’s height. Bending his tail at the “knee” and slinging one of Thrust’s arms over his shoulder. The larger Vehicon wrapped an arm around the other mech’s back and used a massive servo to keep the bike’s dislodged internals in place.

For emphasis, he squeezed three times. Weakly, Thrust nudged him three times back.

“I’m good for that,” Jetstorm said, looking up to try and glare over the tops of the buildings he could no longer reach. He also made note to draw out whatever level of _hurt_ he could against Cheetor when he next saw him on the [other side](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1qzYsESDhc). “Definitely.”


	2. Rain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thrust goes for a drive in the rain. Jetstorm is annoyed. 
> 
> Originally posted on Tumblr as part of a teaser for The Long Way Around, back in September 2020.

In the years following Megatron’s takeover of Cybertron, pollution from the mass production of Vehicons had choked the life out its atmosphere— far more than what was to be expected for a planet that was already just a hunk of metal, with catastrophic consequences.

When the sun _did_ manage to come through the clouds, it was always in a haze that clogged your intakes. Cleaning your vents was mandatory maintenance if you wanted to avoid accidently cooking your internals on a hot evening… or an even hotter morning. There was a good reason no one ever came out unless it was in the middle of the night. Triple digits were the norm in direct sunlight, and rarely did that first digit start with a one. Visibility was throttled through the smog on the best days, thick like smoke on the worst.

It was amazing that the organic half of the Maximals managed to survive as long as they had. Maybe the whole techno-organic spiel that Primal always spat wasn’t so _organic_ after all. The few humans that managed to survive the initial siege were dead by the end of the first year of Megatron’s not-so-little uprising, according to his personal datatracks. They suffocated by the air they had tried so hard to improve when the Pax Cybertronia was first put forward. All that effort to clean up Cybertron after the Great War, wasted… and if they were lucky, the Maximals would go the same way. Eventually. Hopefully?

Nah. That would be too easy.

But the rain. The _rain_. It wasn’t quite concentrated to where it was pure acid, but that slag was _awful_ if you let it stick to you for too long. It seared white streaks on Cybertropolis’ skyscrapers where it chewed away the paint. Everything else that wasn’t glass or cured to withstand such abuse would erode to nothing with the right level of exposure. Jetstorm’s wings always tingled in the worst ways after the sky decided to start spitting, too. The sensation stayed for days after even after a good chemical wash if he wasn’t careful. Fog he could handle. Anything wetter than that made his circuits crawl.

So how the frag _Thrust_ could tolerate it was a mystery. Acid ate through rubber way faster than it tore through anything else, and the cycle-general had been driving laps for the better part of the hour on exposed tires. 

In a torrential downpour.

Like a goddamn _maniac._

Maybe he was just a glutton for punishment?

Jetstorm kept himself tucked under a taller highway overpass, looking down. He watched as his fellow Vehicon started on another lap at top speed. It was a rudimentary figure eight pattern— Thrust would take the freeway entrance going southbound, then exit at the next mile marker before looping back down. Over and over again. Something just… wasn’t _right_ with ground-pounders. How the frag could they manage to keep their sanity following the same roads all the time? The smaller mech was dwarfed by the eight lanes he was weaving between, skirting past obstacles as he came up on them. Jetstorm could only wonder if he was starting to get bored. For the most part, the cyclist travelled in the same lane. Practicing drifting off the exits whenever they came up, tightening the turns every time… the sound of the mech’s engine revving up and down the road popped like gunshots.

The echo was particularly obnoxious with the acoustics surrounding Jetstorm’s current perch. The flier pulled his wings tight against his body as he leaned as far in as possible out of the rain. So much for a “quick” run. Five cycles, Thrust said. Five! What a load of scrap this whole thing was.

The jet scowled when the other general swerved on purpose to hit a puddle on the next lap back. Then, as expected, Thrust immediately spun out and ended up hitting the dividing wall to the opposite freeway. The maroon mech transformed in time to catch himself on the barricade and let loose a string of swears on impact. The resulting _crunch_ reverberated. Thrust was still cursing when he bounced off the wall and went down. Alive… good! No need to rush out in the rain to pick up his partner’s body, or something.

The blue mech waited for the sky to stop dumping before floating down. Dawn was encroaching, and already the temperature had noticeably ticked up. Thrust had rolled onto his back in the meantime. His arm was raised to shield his face from spare droplets still coming from the low-hanging clouds.

Jetstorm leaned over him. “You finished, biker boy?” 

“Nice of you to harp on my rescue,” Thrust said. He reached up with a clawed servo, finally revealing his face. The idiot’s visor was cracked. “You gonna gawk at me all day, or am I actually gonna get a leg up from you?” 

He debated making a joke out of that. Jetstorm held out his servo, yanking Thrust upward when they made contact. He pulled the other mech up— and _kept_ pulling. The momentum brought Thrust upward too fast for him to regain his balance. He immediately pitched forward and ended up face first in the asphalt again. The sound of armor on concrete was grating.

“Aurgh! _Storm!”_

“You said you needed a leg up. Not that you _needed_ to stay up.” Jetstorm scoffed at the streaks in his partner’s armor. He crossed his massive arms in disgust. “Eugh. You look hideous.” 

“Don’t be so blue about it.” 

“Did you just… use a pun? On _me?”_ Jetstorm kept sneering, but this time he couldn’t help but feel a little stupid about it. “I could just— I _will_ beat you to death with my bare servos. You know that, don’t you?” 

“Cute.” Thrust propped himself back up on his own. He was a little less helpless when he wasn’t stuck on his back. As he turned, Jetstorm could see that the treads on his tire were almost bald. There was no way _that_ wasn’t going to be sore. “I’d like to see you try.” 

“I’m cold and _wet,_ and I want to go somewhere that isn’t dripping with anything that’s gonna corrode this paintjob!” Jetstorm bristled at the sound of thunder. “I am _not_ letting myself get caught in another— urgh! How can you _stand_ that?” 

“Eeh. The tingling’s not so bad once you get used to it. Rain wasn’t even that concentrated this time.” Thrust shook his head where it was still dripping with excess water. Then he allowed the shuddering motion to carry into his shoulders and downward. Water flew off his armor. No matter what spark he was carrying around, it was definitely one from the Beast Wars. A self-respecting Transformer would never shake themselves dry like that unless they _had_ been an animal. The cycle-general swayed but otherwise kept himself from falling over again when he was finished. 

Jetstorm recoiled to avoid being hit, raising his talons in self-defense. _“Hey!”_

“Just gotta pop yourself into a working CR tank,” Thrust said, finishing his earlier thought. “Buffs everything right out.”

“That stuff is gross. _You’re_ gross. Stop it. You will never get me into one of those things.”

“Yeah, yeah. You’d rather have _me_ buff out your wings. I remember.” Thrust rolled past, wincing. He’d visibly damaged one of the shock supports in his suspension on the right side, giving him a tilted “limp” that looked even more sore than his tire. “You keep overloading whenever I do, though.”

“Mmm, speaking of which…” It was a nice subject change. Jetstorm let Thrust pass him before turning to follow, keeping close as a precaution— just in case the damaged support gave out. He wondered if he had aggravated the injury by allowing him to fall that second time. Not that he was _worried_ or anything. That would be… “Well. Never mind.” 

“What? You not in the mood for anything?” 

“You’re not exactly in great working condition, biker boy.” 

“I can take my fair share of hits.”

“Why did you even _aim_ for the puddle, anyways?” 

They made it to the shadow of the next overpass when Thrust leaned into him in the dark. Right where no prying optics could see them. Just for balance. Yeah. Jetstorm, being the superior mech he was, allowed the temporary contact as a show of good faith. No other reason.

“You’re warm,” Thrust muttered.

“You’re _drenched_ , and you still didn’t answer my question.” 

The cyclist hummed. The answer was exactly as dumb as he expected for the grounder. “Why not? Looked like it might be fun. You should try it sometimes. Y’know. Stuff that’s _actually_ fun. Not just goading the she-spider or shooting the rest of the Paw Patrol. Tossing temper tantrums. Being a menace. I can sound of a list, if you want.”

Jetstorm sighed, turning around. He aimed his primary weapons, allowed time for a sufficient charge, and fired off a single twin burst plasma rounds. The shots warbled as it singed the humid air, striking the original underpass where he had been sheltering. The bridge immediately collapsed in an upheaval of debris and combustion fire. It cleaved through the highway below and destroyed the bridge suspension. All eight lanes converged in a crumbling twist of shattered asphalt and bent titanium beams.

Thrust shouted and reeled back as the ground shook. He caught himself on the closest barricade again but managed to stay upright this time. As the crumbling structure tore through the road, water sprayed upward from thousands of puddles now ruined.

“Huh. Whatcha know? That _was_ kind of fun,” Jetstorm said.

Thrust buried his face in his servos and muttered something about needing to find him a hobby, or literally _anything_ other than goddamn feral vandalism.


	3. Low Expectations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nightscream and Blackarachnia have a conversation.

“Can you shut up for five minutes? Please?”

To say that Nightscream felt out of place around the Maximals was an understatement. Even as a Maximal himself, Primal and his crew weren’t exactly his kind of “crowd.” His friends from _before_ had been from a young group of young Predacons that lived in the lower districts. They would always hang out together by the abandoned train tracks south of the main city. It was a line that once fed supplies across the planet during the Great Upgrade, tucked out of sight from the elites who would have found it an eyesore… what a damn lucky eyesore it had been for him, too. Nightscream and his friends tromping through those empty passages was what ultimately gave him the edge to survive. When the drones started to appear, those same tunnels were his salvation.

He wished his friends had survived, though. His generation had the mindset that whatever faction you descended from didn’t matter, and he was more than fine with that tight-knit circle he had woven for himself. Knowing they were all gone was a heavy burden. Having to adapt to his _new_ group of friends weighed with a similar intensity.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like these Maximals, though. Primal was… fine. A little weird but otherwise okay. Cheetor was cold and the hardest to get along with. Rattrap seemed to filter between neurotic and obnoxious. They all had a history together so of _course_ they were going feel distant or odd to him. He wasn’t completely unsympathetic. It was just… hard. Adaptation for the sake of literal survival was still a new concept to him, both in a social sense and dodging Vehicons on the regular. Blackarachnia surprised him as being who he got along best with, though. Even before he learned that she had once been reprogrammed into a Preadacon, there was a level of comradery between them. They were both outcasts amongst their peers— in their own unique ways.

She was also pushing her luck with him today. Comradery was one thing, but yacking his audial off about her Beast Wars beau and _Thrust_ was another.

Dawn and dusk both provided the best cover for above-ground scavenging. Not too hot for them to come above ground, and not quite cool enough for the throngs of Vehicons to function without overheating. Nightscream was always quick to volunteer for these runs when the opportunity came. He would have been lying if he said he didn’t miss the sunlight— _real_ sunlight. Not the red-hot haze that Cybertron’s polluted days had turned into. Their party of two kept to the shadows of the tallest buildings in relative safety, but Blackarachnia…

The femme stopped mid-sentence as she snapped her body towards him. Poised high on her eight legs, coiled to strike with a visible scowl on her beast-mode’s face. Nightscream never would have imagined a spider could look so annoyed. _“Excuse_ me?”

Yikes. Better to start backpedalling on this one, then.

“Silverbolt _this_ , Thrust _that_ … that’s all you’ve talked about since we got up here. It’s getting old.” Nightscream swooped low to get closer, landing on a crooked street lamp. The metal was still warm from the sweltering day now fading. On instinct driven by his beast-mode, he allowed gravity to drag his weight forward and down. Primitive and still a little unnerving, but he was getting used to this new version of “hanging around.”

(Yeah. His old pals would’ve found the whole beast-mode thing _hilarious…)_

He hung there and waited for Blackarachnia to get closer, wondering if she was ever going to respond to him. Part of him expected her not to… but she wasn’t completely ignoring him, either. The widow came to a stop beneath the street lamp without a word, no longer glaring at him. She stood there long enough for him to notice her shadow shifting as the sun continued to set. Nightscream was about to speak up—

“You don’t know what we had,” she suddenly said. Quiet. “Silverbolt and I went through so much together. I miss him.”

Which was perfectly reasonable. Nightscream _understood_. He felt bad for even insinuating that was the reason he was annoyed with her, but his interjection hadn’t been out of pure malice. He gathered his voice and hoped not to come across as blunt as before. “What if you’re wrong?”

The spider spun around to look at him, angling her body upwards. _That_ caught her off guard. “What?”

“What if you’re wrong about _Thrust_ , I mean.”

“I’m not.”

It was an _incredibly_ annoying response, by the way. Nightscream definitely felt like he wasn’t being unreasonable. To get dismissed so quickly left a bad aftertaste in his mouth. “Seriously? You don’t think you’re projecting even a little?”

“He saved me.”

“So? You guys saved _me_ , and I’m not a some long lost… hey!”

Nightscream could feel that twitch of annoyance growing as the spider turned away. _Now_ she was ignoring him. The feeling of being disregarded when you felt you had a valid point was a little too much to handle— and mid-sentence, no less. Part of the reason he had so many Predacon friends was because most other Maximals acted the same way: _pious_. Like they knew better _because_ they were from a higher standing in society. Nightscream was never in the Beast Wars, and the feeling that he was looked down on for that among his new “pack” was infuriating.

He let himself fall from the streetlight, righting himself up on the way down. The asphalt was hot under his paw pads. “You didn’t even know you were missing Silverbolt until you found those logs or whatever. You’re putting all this pressure on one guy when you don’t know everything about him.”

“Except I’m _not._ I would know Silverbolt’s spark anywhere. I know what I’m talking about…” Blackarachnia froze mid-stride. Then she turned her whole body around again. That spider’s sneer never left her face. “You think I’m putting too much pressure on _Thrust?”_

“See! Did you hear that? Listen to yourself!” Nightscream spread his wings wide. He wondered if making himself look bigger would help make his point, or at least help her _see_ him. “You talk about Silverbolt and Thrust interchangeably, but Thrust by himself? You could care less. You went from referring to Thrust as Silverbolt to referring to Silverbolt as being trapped _in_ Thrust. So, which one is it?”

“Since when did you care about Thrust?”

“Since it’s obvious that you don’t.” There was more to it than that, obviously. Nightscream held his wings aloft a second time. “What if that’s some guy other than Silverbolt in there? What then?”

“He has memories of the Beast Wars.”

“Fine. Sure. That’s fair. Maybe it’s some _other_ guy from Prehistoric Earth survived and hitched a ride back with you guys. You ever think about that?”

 _That_ stoked the fire of a potential meltdown. Blackarachnia lunged at him, practically hissing. “Do not _even_ suggest.”

“Why?” Nightscream glowered. “Set your expectations low and you won’t ever be disappointed. That’s what I always do. I kept telling myself that everything was going to be fine right before the virus took out most of Cybertron, and that didn’t end so great. _Then_ I kept telling myself that I was going to be alone underground forever, and… well. Nothing ever happens like you want it. Always expect disaster so you’re ready for it.”

“Silverbolt _is_ in Thrust.” Blackarachnia was done with the conversation. She turned away. “I know he is. End of conversation. I’m not wrong.”

He didn’t press the issue further and watched as she scaled the alleyway wall next to them. As she ascended into the dark, there were the first distant revs of Vehicons that echoed down the empty street. Time to head out. The bat lifted off and kept up with the line of extending shadows as the sun continued to set through the smog, filtered dark red in the haze. They hadn’t found anything on this trip, but he had already prepped himself to go back into the Catacombs empty-handed. Low expectations and all that.

(He should have set his expectations for their conversation low, too.)

“Bet you anything you’re still wrong,” he mumbled.

Before following Blackarachnia into one of the buildings with access to the service tunnels, he turned his gaze towards the Citadel. Talk about eyesores— he never had much of an affinity for the pretentious air it gave. The Tripredacus Council had their tiny satellite station and secret hideaways while the Maximal Elders had their damn own _castle_. It spoke to the larger issues with Cybertron in this post-war era: the expectation that were had that they could simply repeat history without consequence. Nightscream was tempted to level more blame on them than Megatron for all the sparks being stolen. He was a symptom to a larger problem and not the disease itself. He recognized enough of that from his old Predacon buddies. He hoped they hadn’t suffered.

It was also just his luck that he would spot two Vehicons moving down the length of super-highway leading from the Citadel’s structure. Across all twelve lanes, a single bike and low-hanging jet were a little too conspicuous to be a set of sparkless randos… for Blackarachnia’s sake, he really _did_ hope that Thrust had Silverbolt’s spark. Whether he himself was Silverbolt or not, her persistence to get her old flame back meant she would be putting herself in harm’s way. Jetstorm and Thrust had appearing as a duo much more recently. The chemistry between them far outpaced anything that the Maximals had. _Their_ crowd of two made for a deadly combination. If Blackarachnia ever went after Thrust on her own, she would have his other half to contend with… and the blue Vehicon _never_ hesitated when it came to trying to dismantle her.

It gave him an awful thought.

“My credits are on Jetstorm,” Nightscream said out loud to himself. “ _That’s_ setting your expectations as low as you can go…”


	4. Blackmail.exe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thrust is given an order he can't refuse.
> 
> Set in a universe where Rhinox doesn’t go straight to the Oracle to retrieve the Key to Vector Sigma, amongst… other things. Why run the risk of running into the Maximals when you can cash in on a little insurance policy, first?

“May I be of assistance?”

“No.”

“Well, then. Perhaps you can do something for _me,_ instead…”

Diagnostic drones were a dime a dozen under the Citadel’s roof. Small, inconspicuous, and non-threatening to match. Their basic artificial intelligence programs made them well-suited for technical and administrative tasks, which the Vehicon drones were… not so good at. Shooting at stuff they could do with deadly efficiency, but anything requiring _finesse_ was out of their capabilities. Diagnostic drones could also function on directives independent from the Vehicon control relays. It made them perfect to engage in long-term tasks with little or no management.

They were once used to at large to sort and store data cassettes in Iacon’s Vaults before the Great War, but you didn’t hear that from Thrust. All but Megatron’s personal datatracks were supposed to be wiped on a planetary scale. Any knowledge of Cybertron before he took his tenure as supreme ruler should have been unavailable to the generals… unless you had an inkling of where else to look. Lack of finesse aside, a Vehicon didn’t need to be good with computers to break into apartments and raid a personal library or two— or forty. Career criminality was underrated. So was reading, Thrust thought.

(All this emphasis on purging every public digital archive on the planet, and Megatron and the Maximals had somehow forgotten about the existence of _books_. Wild.)

Megatron also tended to blast his way through enough diagnostic drones when he was in a foul mood. Thrust would often wonder where the replacements came from. Maybe there was a shipping crate lying around full of ‘em, waiting to be wound up like damn toys, but D.D. was a unique case. The artificial intelligence of Megatron’s _personal_ drone was more sophisticated than the others. A speech processor and rudimentary personality core made him seem “smarter” than the rest, straight down to his mannerisms. There was also the fact that Megatron went out of his way to preserve him. Thrust wondered why.

Megatron must have found it endearing. Thrust thought it was creepy.

Especially when D.D. lingered over your shoulder after arriving unannounced, and _especially_ when he asked for something.

Which he never did.

Until now.

Thrust looked up from the repairs he was doing. A busted joint connector in his elbow had made the rotator cuff stiff, courtesy of a certain bat. The restoration chambers had failed to properly realign the components and warranted a manual fix. He had to dissemble part of his arm turret’s firing mechanism in the process. Feeling only half-armed (literally) had him on edge. _“You_ need somethin?”

“Just a small errand, really…” D.D. hovered around the larger mech, getting up close. Way too close. The cyclist could hear the drone’s tiny fans working inside his rounded hull. “You will be assisting Tankor. It is a special assignment to help rid our leader of his _dreaded_ beast-mode. I may have found a solution.”

“Still think he should just jump into a new body instead of making all this fuss,” Thrust said. He went back to soldering his trigger mechanism back into place. The sooner he could get his weapons back to full functionality, the better he would feel. He should have asked Jetstorm to spot him… not that he ever would have imagined getting jumped like this. “Seems like a lot of drama over a few scales.”

“Yes, well— this is why _I_ am in charge of his care, and _you_ are hired muscle.”

“Hire suggests pay,” Thrust said. He sure as the Pitt knew that none of the other generals were getting compensation, besides the allowance to continue living. _Slavery_ was the word he wanted to use to describe their situation. “What’s the gig?”

“You are to distract the Maximals while Tankor retrieves data from the supercomputer Vector Sigma.”

There were at least three red flags in that sentence alone. “Distract all five Maximals. While _Tankor_ is doing data recovery. From the _Oracle.”_

“Vector Sigma. It is nothing more than a computer. To suggest otherwise is ludicrous.” D.D. paused. “How peculiar. You are aware of the mythology surrounding Vector Sigma? Fascinating. Wherever would you have gotten such data?”

“None of your business.”

“Hm…”

What was _ludicrous_ was this conversation he was having. Thrust felt like he was having a fight-or-flight reaction. Something was… off. He hadn’t been around the block for long, but he wasn’t gullible— and neither was Waspinator. The sensation radiating up from his spark suggested that the young Predacon knew when to recognize _treachery_. He debated sending Jetstorm a ping to get his aft in here, then realized that the diagnostic drone would pick up on it in such close quarters. Damn.

The bugger was already ahead on the curve for that one. “Jetstorm will not be participating in this assignment. This task requires an element of delicacy— and your business very much is my business, I’m afraid. You cannot keep a secret from me.”

“Sounds more like you don’t want too many loose ends,” Thrust hissed. “The boss know about this? You’re out of your mind if you think I can deal with all five Maximals on my own. Megatron ought to check your circuits for bugs in your code.”

 _That_ garnered a reaction. The drone’s optics flashed brighter. The tiny fans inside his frame kicked up a notch higher. He sounded angry. “You won’t say anything. Not unless you are eager to receive repercussions.”

“And _that_ sounded like a threat.” Thrust lifted his arms and switched off the safety in his weapons. His right turret still wasn’t anywhere near ready to use, but he hoped the menace of being pumped full of bullets would stand effective. “I smell a rat, and it ain’t no Maximal. What are you plannin?”

“Jetstorm is aware that he has Silverbolt’s spark.”

Thrust felt like he was in a tunnel. There was the sensation of gravity dragging his spark down and out of its spark chamber, sinking into the bottom of his fuel processor. He froze. He tried to lower his arms and found his kinetics had caught. Frozen.

“Yes. The connection that you and the other generals have to your drones goes two ways.” D.D. was acting awfully casual about this. In spite of that, his smooth vocal codec dripped with a certain level of animosity. “Data from this connection is uploaded to the Citadel’s computers where the master drone controls are located. While Megatron has had no interest in monitoring your activity, I have found yours and Jetstorm’s interactions _most_ interesting. Discovering who your sparks belonged to on your own is impressive. You have both been… busy. It is as I said. Your business _is_ my business.”

Thrust felt condensation bead on the back of his neck. His own fans were running on high. “Get to your point.”

“It would be a shame if Megatron were to _learn_ that two of his generals have been… distracted. Such a distraction would explain your lack of drive to exterminate the Maximals. It would be even _more_ shameful for him to learn that you are both aware of the sparks you carry. Waspinator poses no threat, but _Silverbolt_ …”

Thrust amassed every firewall in his arsenal. Layering them on top of each other, delving deep behind a series of decoy programs before diving into his shared network settings. He had always been aware of possible security issues, but never a full data breach like was being implied. Sure enough, he found evidence that the one-way transfer tool had been patched into by means of the drone-control synapses. By sending data out for his drones to respond to, it left him open for his information to be hijacked. Someone with insider knowledge of how the system worked could get in and out completely unnoticed— like a small, inconspicuous, non-threatening diagnostic drone. Entire drives were compromised. His vision cortex had even been hacked at some point. There were dozens of trojans buried the drive he remote-shared with Jetstorm. He was _infested_ with malware.

“I see you’ve been doing some extra-curricular reading,” D.D. suddenly said, and Thrust realized with a pang of dread that the firewalls had done absolutely nothing. No sense in locking the doors when the intruder was already inside. “I never would have pinned you for the educational type. Then again, I never would have pinned Jetstorm as _affectionate…”_

“Megatron needs us,” Thrust snapped, and hated how shallow his voice squeaked past his vocalizer. “We’re not replaceable. I’ll bet my life on that.”

“On the contrary, Thrust! Ignoring everything else, Megatron’s own mental status has wavered in the last few weeks. His rage towards Optimus Primal on top of his condition and has made him unpredictable.” The drone lowered himself to Thrust’s line of sight again, once again drawing himself way too close. “It would not take much to convince him of how much of a _threat_ Jetstorm is to his grand design. Even with no sheep to threaten, a wolf in the fold is still a wolf. Resorting to euthanasia is the most logical recourse for such a dilemma. Would you not agree? ”

Thrust and D.D. stared at each other. The Vehicon felt the condensation building on his helmet start to run.

“You will do as I ask,” D.D. said. “You have no choice. To bet your own life is one matter, but you will not bet Jetstorm’s.

“When do I go?” Thrust asked.

The diabolical drone chuckled with a voice that wasn’t his. Whoever was pulling his strings was an even worse threat than Megatron.

“Immediately.”


	5. Bad Romantic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Je veux ton amour et je veux ta revanche.

Thrust was scowling at him. “Could you knock it off and actually _try_ to be romantic for once?”

Well, then! He was adept to his fair share of criticisms when it came to their usual dealings with the Maximals, but this was… new. Usually, any kind of berating came from Blackarachnia. Nightscream was giving her a run for her credits by being the next runner up, though. The teenager was beginning to get on his last nerve, taking it upon himself to call Jetstorm out on any mistakes he made during their aerial spats. A crash (or seven) too many on his part had given the young Maximal an unneeded boost of confidence. One false move, and the brat would be _relentless_ in dragging his name through the dirt. Thrust was always quick to point out that he would fare better if he stopped underestimating the kid, but the concept alone was maddening. How was he meant to take a rat with wings seriously? Worse still, how was he meant to take being outpaced by a flighted rodent as anything other than a personal affront? The sky was _his_. He wasn’t keen on sharing it.

Then there was the separate matter of the widow. If she tried to call him Silverbolt _one more time_ , he was going to have an absolute nuclear meltdown. A total banger temper tantrum. Heads would roll. He might even try to strangle her a little before popping hers clean off her shoulders, just to feel her choke under his claws. Her callouts for his lack of morals and how she was tired of “pleading” with him to “come home” were another kind of affront altogether. He wasn’t some damn lost dog. Shredding the spider with plasma bursts felt a little too nice for his liking— even if Thrust insisted he not hurt her.

(Because of _course_ the damn fool still had feelings for her. What an absolute twit.)

Coming from Thrust, though? Any kind of condemnation was a joke. He knew exactly where he stood with the other Vehicon when it came to their worst traits: their ugliness and drama by sheer configuration. They could both be a little sick and vengeful. Jetstorm could fire off ripostes without needing to put that much thought into them— Thrust gave him plenty of material to work with. This time was almost laughable, under the circumstances.

Almost.

“I’m plenty romantic, sweetspark.” Jetstorm poised his claws upward, menacing a boogeyman’s posture. Part of him _did_ feel like laughing, but something in the other mech’s tone suggested it might not be a good idea. So, he did the one thing he knew how to do best: deflect. “I do _bad_ romance. Gaga has nothing on this design.”

He thought it was funny, but Thrust might have needed more convincing to warrant the reaction he was looking for. Then again, the bike could also be a little dense. The cyclist refused to talk to him for the rest of the night. They finished their usual patrols without the bike uttering another word. Fine. Whatever. Jetstorm could take a hint when someone was in bad mood— and like sharing his airspace with Nightscream, he wasn’t keen on going out of his way to play nice. Fixing _this_ in the moment felt like too much work with too little payoff.

Except Jetstorm knew he had messed up worse than “bad” when his partner continued to ignore him.

Daylight hours were usually safest time to recharge without risking Maximal interruption, although the concept of “safety” had been a stretch as of late. Savage was a not-so-delightful surprise after their boss kicked the bucket. No Vehicon hordes also meant that the Maximals could come and go from the tunnels as they pleased. They would usually take watch in shifts so they could each get some shuteye, but those most sweltering days meant it would be fine to sleep at the same time. The Maximals weren’t fireproof. As for Savage, the monster’s ability to spit fire meant that he was probably straight-up flammable at a certain melting point.

When they returned to their hideout, Jetstorm waited for Thrust to join him in the back bunker and was baffled when he never came in. A proximity scan showed him that Thrust was at his usual post by the apartment’s window. Was he taking watch _specifically_ to avoid him? Jetstorm powered down alone out of frustration. The suspicion that he had fumbled worse than anticipated was starting to settle.

He came to megacycles later in an empty den. Thrust’s energy signature was completely absent. The bike wasn’t at his post.

The heat of the day made it impossible to go looking for him right away. Jetstorm had to wait until early-afternoon for the temperature to go down to a manageable level. Winter in Cybertron’s northern hemisphere was encroaching, and Cybertropolis was close enough to the pole that the days were getting shorter. Unfortunately, cooler and darker conditions meant that the Maximals would be out more often.

A rogue thought passed that _maybe_ Thrust had used the opportunity to seek out Blackarachnia. They had been… romantic. Supposedly. Jetstorm never pressed for information about whatever the bike and the spider had before they found out who’s hood Silverbolt was _really_ under, but he could imagine. He could also imagine what Blackarachnia would do to Thrust if he came snooping around. Any reservations she may have had about thrashing him stupid were gone as long as he was stuck toting Waspinator’s spark. Jetstorm wasn’t sure he could handle Thrust getting pummelled without backup.

He thankfully never had to venture into the underground to track down his missing companion. Instead, the bike’s energy signature popped back on his radar in the middle of the city. He was at the _Citadel?_

Jetstorm altered his course and arrived in its darkened airspace in silence. Seeing the grandiose structure without its permanent glow and spotlights was still strange to him. It looked less blue and more grey under the red haze, like an oversized mechanical corpse. Gross. Getting inside the main structure was impossible without proper access codes, but there was a docking garage with access from the main freeway. A previous lifetime would have seen this as the site for supply shipments. Jetstorm could already see the glow of Thrust’s visor in the shadowy bay out of the sun’s setting reach.

He knew he had to tread carefully.

“This an awful spot for a date, biker boy,” Jetstorm said, absolutely hating that he had no pedes, no facial opening, and _still_ managed to talk with his foot in his mouth. So much for being careful. “Next time, I get to pick.”

Thrust said nothing. He was leaning on one of the concrete support columns between a set of parking platforms. The mech turned his head away, glaring downcast. Fresh bullet holes impacted in the adjacent wall told Jetstorm that he better tread lighter.

Jetstorm took one side of the concrete pillar while Thrust stayed on the other. They watched night continue to descend in silence. The red haze faded into an obscure glow that blurred the lines between the shadows cutting across the floor.

“I was worried that you ran off to harass the Maximals,” Jetstorm muttered. He omitted any mention of Blackarachnia.

“Nah. Came straight here.” The smaller Vehicon rumbled, shifting his weight against the pillar. “Needed to vent. Didn’t want to keep you up with any gunfire.”

“Going halfway across the city feels like overkill for target practice. You could have stayed closer to home.”

Thrust shrugged. “Driving clears my head. I needed not think for a while. That’s all.”

“Sure. Right.” Jetstorm crossed his arms. “That’s all.”

Thrust finally moved, pulling up and away from the column so he could linger in the throat of the garage’s entrance. Jetstorm hovered behind him. It was another few cycles before the aero-general ushered in enough nerve to reach up and hook a set of talons around Thrust’s hip. He tried to pull him closer and was relieved then the bike pivoted his wheel to allow it. Thrust didn’t fight him as they remained in the shade. The moon’s glow replaced any traces of fading pink.

“You may need to help me out here,” Jetstorm admitted. “I’m not exactly great at... this.”

Thrust rumbled. He reached up with a servo, tapping the other mech on the chest. His weapons had long since been switched back to their safety-mode. “This is a good start.”

“What is?”

“Never mind. I’ll tell you later.” Thrust leaned into him. “We got plenty of time to go over the nuances.”

“Try not to get too upset with me in the meantime, then. I’m more revenge than romance.”

Thrust shrugged again. “All things considered, I _do_ appreciate your [vertigo schtick](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ussx0a1cxaQ).”


	6. With Beauty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thrust endures a spa treatment. "Endures," because Jetstorm is the one doing the treating. It goes about well as you would expect.

The tension in Jetstorm’s shoulders had locked his joints in place, squaring up his frame as if he intended to fight. Yeah. He was definitely getting annoyed. “Sit still!”

“No.”

Thrust _did_ try to sit still, though. Any utterances to the contrary were done out of reflex, without any real malice. The last thing he needed was for Jetstorm to throw a fit when he was obsessing over something in such close quarters. Better to let the jet have his way than fight back. Not that Thrust was passive to the point of rolling over whenever he was threatened, but he knew when to pick and choose his battles. Jetstorm meant well. Maintaining any good relationship always involved some level of compromise.

Compromise also kept him from developing a splitting headache whenever Jetstorm started squawking. Thrust would always take those small victories in stride. Some kind of payoff was never too far down the road, either.

Despite himself, the bike flinched again. A talon digging too far into a transformation seam caused him to twitch. Jetstorm smacked him over the side of the helmet for his troubles.

“Oof. Uh oh.” The anger the jet’s tone all but evaporated. His hand immediately went to press against the side of Thrust’s face where he’d been struck. “That, uuh… I can buff that out.”

“Did you just put a _dent_ in my head?” Thrust tried to snap his neck around to look, then realized it was impossible with the angle. His partner’s expression told him all he needed to know. _“Jetstorm!”_

“Relax! I’ll fix it!”

All of this fussing over some scratches. Unbelievable. Thrust huffed and tried to settle down as best he could. The Citadel’s security station washroom was spacious, but he hated feeling so exposed. Between that and the near-constant jostling…

“Wouldn’t be squirming so much if you were gentler,” Thrust mumbled. “I thought waxing was supposed to be nice.”

“It is when you do proper cleanings ahead of time. Can’t do a wax if you’re covered in… urgh! What do you even use when you clean yourself? Just _soap?”_

Thrust had a feeling he was going to regret his answer. “Standard chemical wash. Nothing fancy.”

Jetstorm sounded like he might have a conniption. “How am _I_ supposed to look my best when _you_ won’t give yourself a proper wash!? Honestly!”

Thrust endured another round of rough scrubbing. The jet’s claws continued to cram between his nooks and divots, yanking Thrust back and forth where he was seated on one of the washroom benches. He felt like he might end up with more scratches than he started with. Jetstorm may have had a point about his lackluster bathing habits, though. The bike wasn’t entirely negligible, but there was noticeable grime that the other mech was able to fish out using only the cleaning cloth. Another quick spray with the hose hooked to one of the wash stalls sent brown water down the nearest drain. The spots that were closest to the road while Thrust was in vehicle-mode seemed to be especially bad. The cloth would always come back black where Jetstorm scrubbed hardest.

“You’re disgusting,” Jetstorm seethed. He flung the ruined rag across the room. It struck the wall with a hideous _splat_. “This is horrible. I can’t work like this. I’m getting the pressure washer.”

Thrust only felt slight relief when Jetstorm moved away to mess with his stash of equipment. No wonder he was always so spotless— the larger Vehicon had enough tools to take up an entire defunct stall and an entire maintenance bench. Thrust’s sense of reprieve was quick to fade as he watched Jetstorm expertly assemble the attachments for the hose’s pressure washer setting. He was also ashamed to say that he wasn’t sure what half of the other containers may have held, or what their purpose was. He tended to focus on the bare minimum when it came to hygiene. Why bother with deep cleans when you were just going to get tossed to the animals again the next day— literally.

Thrust reached up and felt along the dent in his head. It was a miracle he hadn’t gotten a damn concussion. “Ow.”

“I said I’ll fix it,” Jetstorm griped, dragging the hose back over to him. He also dropped a bucket of extra supplies next to his wheel. The jet must have seen whatever dejected expression Thrust had, because he sighed and changed the pitch of his voice. Softer. “It’s mostly road rash. No one would be filthy like this on purpose.”

“The Maximals might have you beat on that one.”

“Don’t even start, roller boy.” Jetstorm plucked up a plastic container from the bucket and gouged it open with a sharpened talon. The bottle burst as it was pierced. “I’m trying to pamper you, here.”

Thrust grumbled but let the jet continue where he left off, which now involved dumping the entire contents of that ruined bottle on him. The cleaning solution was thick and sank into his crevasses with an unnerving tingle. Some kind of deep-cleanse solvent, then. Jetstorm yanked out a tough-bristled brush and started scrubbing. Despite himself, Thrust found that this was much easier to sit still through. He caught himself leaning into the treatment as Jetstorm moved from his back to his front and around again. Scrubbing down his shoulders, his neck, his chassis…

It was a little frustrating when the jet purposely avoided his hotspots, but the treatment was having other effects. Twice, Thrust nodded off. The third time he caught himself with his chin resting on his chest and his visor shade drawn. Jetstorm had switched using a soft-bristled brush at some point. He never noticed when.

Jetstorm was smug. “Having fun?”

“Hhm.” Thrust twitched back to awareness at the sound of his voice. The scrubbing had stopped. “Sure. Whatever.”

He would have fallen asleep, if it wasn’t for someone tapping on the top of his head. Groggily, Thrust looked up. Jetstorm had the nozzle end of the pressure washer pointed directly at his face.

“Good morning,” Jetstorm said. He pulled the trigger.

If his turrets weren’t full of suds, Thrust would have shot him. Then he would have taken the washer gun out of Jetstorm’s servos and beaten him with it. As it was, he was sent sprawling off the bench and onto the floor as the assault continued. The shriek that tore out of his vocalizer echoed in the washroom and must have carried across half of the Citadel.

“Mother _fucker!”_

Jetstorm sprayed him in the face again. _“Language!_ Whatever would the executives at Fox Kids say?”

“FUCK! _What the fuck is wrong with you!?”_

Jetstorm finished hosing him down on the highest setting. “I can give you a list, if you want one. Spoiler alert: one is a phobia, three are paraphilias, and the rest have fun acronyms to go with them. I’ll give you a prize if you can guess what ADHD and BPD stand for.”

Thrust let out another string of curses and spat up water from the vents he hadn’t shuttered in time. He lowered his arms only when he was sure he wasn’t going to face another torrent. “I’ll kill you dead.”

“Only if you think the Maximals stand a chance of getting to me first. I’d rather have it be you than anyone else.” Jetstorm reached down, yanking him upward by one of his shoulder plates. “Hit the dryer. I need to clean _this_ mess up.”

Thrust wasn’t sure what he meant until he got to the drying station and saw what was being referred to. The water that hadn’t yet made it to the drains was pitch black with _bits_. Thrust kept his vocalizer on mute as he watched Jetstorm hose the floor and bench down. All this fussing over some scratches and then some. There was no way that the jet had meant to spend all this time on him— _he_ had to compromise, too.

“Maybe I need some pointers,” Thrust said as he exited the dryer. Embarrassed.

“It’s not _your_ fault that you don’t know how to exfoliate. You have to actually be good at this kind of thing.” Jetstorm finished and tossed the pressure washer aside as if it had personally offended him. Then he snatched an oversized towel from his pile of plundered goods and tossed it on the bench. “On your chest.”

“You think I’m gonna trust you after that little trick you pulled?”

“Naturally.”

Thrust snarled as he pulled himself up onto the table. Then he watched as Jetstorm retrieved one last set of items from his pile. What could have been misconstrued as a power drill made Thrust tense before he saw the other mech finish the assembly. A plush applicator was fixed to the end and screwed into place. Jetstorm tested the trigger mechanism with a near-sinister chuckle. The whisper-quiet motor spun to life with surprising ferocity.

Jetstorm reached up next to him and switched off the main lights. The washroom went dark before switching to purple. His already bright colors flashed fluorescent.

“The black lights set the wax,” he purred. “Time for the fun part. You’re _definitely_ going to like this…”

Thrust could feel his fans running hard. It had nothing to do with the heat from the dryer. “You still gotta fix that new dent you gave me.”

“Mhmm, I already did it while you were snoozing.” Jetstorm traced a knuckle over where the dent had once been. True to word, it was smoothed over. He picked up the wax container and spun the applicator through it. The glow from his optics spoke to all Thrust’s compromises about to be paid off. “Pain and pleasure go servo-in-servo with beauty.”

Thrust tried to stay still. He really did, but through all his shaking, Jetstorm didn’t scold him again— not even once.


	7. Crosshair

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In more ways than one, Jetstorm hates feeling like a target. Meanwhile, Thrust is the only one paying attention where it matters.
> 
> Takes place in an extended-cast universe. Mirage is kind of a dick.

  
“I heard a noise.”

Jetstorm looked down at Thrust. He could already feel a scowl pulling down the flexmesh on his mask. _“I_ didn’t hear anything.”

“You ought to recalibrate your sensors, then.”

He didn’t like being accused of anything that wasn’t cast in a positive light, or as positive as you could get when you _wanted_ to be acknowledged as a menace. Badgering the Maximals wasn’t exactly a nicety, but he still took pride in it. There was a certain charm in knowing that you were an obstacle to someone else’s goals— especially when it wasn’t possible to have your own.

Once, Thrust asked him why.

“Why… what?”

The bike wasn’t exactly the type to lose his temper, but something about this line of dialogue had set him on edge. Thrust’s engine idled higher. Anxious. “Why would you think we can’t have our own goals?”

This felt accusatory, too. Jetstorm wasn’t sure why or even how to process it. He had no way to explain himself in the heat of the moment. Evaluating his own emotions was never an easy thing for him. The subject was dropped on that uncomfortable note and left to stew. It wasn’t until much later that the jet figured he might have an answer: that having _goals_ only mattered if someone else was around to admire them. As far as he imagined, he had no one but himself. So why bother?

Speaking of living in the heat of the moment, being told that he was deaf so some imaginary sound that Thrust was picking up on was… well. Irritating. _This_ kind of accusation was one that he wasn’t going to let slip.

“You’re losing it,” [Mirage](https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Mirage_\(BM\)) rumbled, beating him to the punch. The chase-model general was staring down at his datapad with barely any interest. He crossed another quadrant off their list of areas to search. “There’s no one here but us.”

 _No one_ was subjective. Ground-based drones were running patrol in the distance. An aero drone platoon streaked past in the sky overhead. Adding to the sound of distant engines were droves more, all searching for the Maximals. Scrambling this many units at the same time seemed like an awful lot of fuss just to test a new weapon. Megatron’s personal diagnostic drone had been wanting to use the Key to Vector Sigma on the planet’s organic core, but Megatron insisted on first testing the copies on a transorganic body.

Jetstorm generally chose to ignore the boring science-based conversations when given the opportunity. Leave the thinking to D.D. and Megatron, and the heavy lifting to Tankor, Mirage, and Thrust.

(Well. Tankor was gone, now. The jet still had hope that Megatron would take him up on the offer to take charge of the tank drones.)

“Perhaps you require your own recalibration,” D.D. said. He seemed like he was only half paying attention, too. The diagnostic drone had definitely seemed distracted over the past megacycle. Not that long ago, he accused the Vehicons of both having less _proficient_ tracking equipment as him. “A round in the restoration chamber should—”

“Nothin’ wrong with my hearing.” Thrust turned his gaze towards the line of skyscrapers off the freeway exit. His visor narrowed in his own scowl. “I’m tellin’ you, I heard a _noise._ Not the drones. Somethin’ else.”

Speaking of drones, an aero drone floated too close behind Jetstorm. The blunt end of its wielded key copy jabbed him in the back. Already in a mood, he turned around to swat at it with one of his massive servos. The sound of metal on metal—

“There!”

“That was _me_ , you idiot!” Jetstorm leered, shoving the offending drone away a second time. It insisted on wandering back into his personal space. “Stop wasting our time!”

“Maximal signature detected,” D.D. chimed suddenly, pointing down the stretch of highway again. Adding insult to injury, Jetstorm could detect no Maximal energy readout. “We should continue our search in _this_ direction…”

“I’m still not picking up on a signal,” Mirage mused, subspacing his datapad. The older Vehicon was looking increasingly agitated, gears locking in aggravation. “Thrust isn’t the only one needing repairs, I think— not that repairs will help. You shell program models are hardly sophisticated enough to avoid glitches.”

 _“Excuse_ me?” Jetstorm propped his servos on his hips. “You want to run that by me a second time, old timer?”

“You heard me.”

Thrust wasn’t going to be much help in the spat that was quickly devolving. D.D. said something to try and break it up, and Jetstorm remembered his vocalizer buzzing with the intent to snap something back. Memory failed him. Over the course of five seconds, Thrust had his alt-mode face aimed towards a line of buildings. His glare towards the skyline was narrowed.

“Sounded like a…” the mech’s optic displays went wide. His RPM ticked higher as he phased through a slew of emotions. Anxiety. Fear. _Horror._

“Thrust?”

“Get _down!”_

 _That_ time, Jetstorm heard something— the sound of a bolt-action mechanism snapping backwards and into place. Optimus Primal’s crew never used weapons, so this was another survivor. The actual shot rang heavy to the tune of something that was _extra_ heavy caliber. An anti-tank weapon, scoped from a far enough distance that Jetstorm never heard it until it was too late.

Thrust transformed and lunged, tackling him. Jetstorm was shoved unceremoniously to the side. The mindless aero drone that had been hovering behind him was eviscerated. Shrapnel soared, shredding D.D. to pieces in the moments that followed. Mirage similarly threw himself to the ground to avoid being gutted in the resulting twin explosions.

Thrust was shouting as Jetstorm’s audials rang. “Go! _Go!”_

The echo of the weapon being reloaded was sharp and resounding. The sniper was no longer attempting to hide the sound as its echo clicked with weighted menace. Whoever was firing on them was skilled, because another shot rang out and slammed into the pavement just ahead of them moments after they started their retreat. Jetstorm’s audio-reception cortex blew out from the feedback a second time. He rocketed left to avoid another too-close prediction shot. Mirage swerved under him.

There was no road for Thrust to follow. He fell in line behind Mirage, swinging on his one tire in reverse. He opened fire on the buildings at random. “Go up! He can’t aim at both of us!”

A gun with that much firepower would also be stationary. Aiming _up_ would be impossible. Call Thrust what you would, but he was a damn talented bastard when it came to keeping his focus under stress. Jetstorm ascended but maintained a zig-zagging pattern for added insurance. He had been proven wrong about one thing too many already, but not about Thrust’s loyalty. _Both of us_ had no bearing on Mirage’s well-being. Mirage didn’t care for them. Each other, on the other hand…

Once he reached an optimal height, Jetstorm scrambled his drone-control synapses to call for a personal battalion. He arched high, spun, and was only halfway through charging his plasma canon mounts when another shot rang out below him. His shortwave sonar equipment allowed him to use the resulting echo as a guide. The source came from a skyscraper embroidered with signage for Kinetic Solutions Incorporated, one mile away. A line of windows was removed from the top floors.

Something gleamed. The barrel of a weapon.

 _There_.

He wasn’t the only one who noticed, either. Mirage pinged him over a private frequency. “One of Primal’s crew must have gone rogue! Has to be [Apelinq](https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Apelinq_\(BM\))! No one else is that crazy to try and take us all out at once! Get down here and cover me!”

Jetstorm used the extension of his drone-synapse relay to find out where the other general was hiding. He followed Mirage’s signal once he locked on. The racer was holed between a set of buildings in an alleyway. Jetstorm descended and swore as another shot rang out. The sniper was still shooting at them. Thrust wasn’t with him.

“Where’s biker boy?”

Mirage stared at him. “You didn’t see?”

“No.”

The older Vehicon scoffed. “Too slow. He didn’t make it.”

Something in Jetstorm ran cold as he peered around the corner. In the middle of the road was a single Vehicon. The smoking crater below the middle of Thrust’s chest was smoking. His visor was dark.

There really _must_ have been something wrong with his hearing. It took him another second to recognize the sound of his own scream.

Another shot rang out and struck the building a foot above his head. Mirage yanked him back by the wing.

“Pull yourself together and get your drones to _protect_ us!” Mirage’s optics were wild. For all his complaints of the second-generation Vehicons being glitched, the veteran was too rattled to call for his own. “We’re the only two generals left. Forget about him and focus on the assignment!”

Jetstorm had to resist the urge to reach out and throttle him. “You can teleport! Fire up your generator and get Thrust _out of there!”_

The other Vehicon refused to budge. “Weaklings get what they deserve. Survival of the fittest is the law in this war. He’s a dead mech.”

Except he _wasn’t_ dead. He Mirage both knew it. Thrust’s energy signature was still a revolving blip on Jetstorm’s sensor suite. His borrowed spark as in jeopardy but still proving an efficient power source for his shell program. A faint shudder was vibrating Thrust’s battered chassis as he trembled in agony. Getting him to a restoration chamber as soon as possible would—

“Don’t you dare,” Mirage warned. “You’re out of your mind, you _maniac_. Don’t you—!”

Jetstorm wasn’t one for understanding goals, because he had never had one of his own. Now seemed as good of a time as any. He didn’t like being accused of anything that wasn’t cast in a positive light, or as positive as you could get when you _wanted_ to be acknowledged as a menace… but much as he hated being painted in a spectrum that wasn’t on his own terms, that painted a target on his back, Mirage casting Thrust as someone not worth saving felt even worse.

He fired off his thrusters on full blast, rocketing out of the alley. Jetstorm dove for Thrust just as he heard the bolt-action mechanism snap back once more.


	8. Music Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jetstorm makes Thrust think about art, except Thrust is one of those introspective types who broods too much already. 
> 
> CONTENT WARNING: they are definitely (tastefully) banging.

Jetstorm arched upward, flexing his talons against the other Vehicon’s chassis. “I bet you feel like an artist.”

Leave it to the aerial to say something weird in the middle of… well. Whatever it was they were supposed be doing. The jet never _did_ know when to keep his vocalizer on mute and let a good thing play without complication. To the same credit, he didn’t know how to not overanalyze: no one had the luxury to be short-sighted during the Spark War. They both had their faults. The end result was the chaotic melody that they used to play off each other. This piece that they had built for themselves was a rhapsody of unsound sound. _Feral_ , but not all for the sake of violence. There could be wild softness in there. Somewhere. Sometimes.

“Hmmm…”

Either way, this definitely wasn’t what Megatron had in mind for them when they were brought online. They _weren’t_ supposed to be doing this. The Predacon overload demanded total obedience in exchange for their allowance to exist— their only reason to exist. He had gone out of his way to capture all the sparks on Cybertron for a purpose. Being forced to rely on free thinking individuals, even of his own creation, was a low blow for him. Thrust recognized that and knew it was sensitive enough of an issue to warrant skirting around. The bike tended to roll with the punches as they came, but this felt like something that necessitated hiding. Not because it was wrong, but because anything that wasn’t made in Megatron’s strict image was at risk of destruction. Creativity was a symptom of the freedoms he was so desperate to crush.

Megatron wasn’t an art guy. Maybe before the Beast Wars… but not now. He’d had enough monuments levelled across Cybertropolis to make his hatred obvious.

Thrust didn’t feel like an artist, but he liked to look at the big picture when it came to how his life had decided to unfold. So yeah. He thought art was nice.

“Hnnm! Thrust…!”

Meanwhile, taking the time to _admire_ art was something that Thrust didn’t have much confidence in. Liking art was one thing. _Understanding_ it could be a little harder on the processor. He’d raided enough personal libraries to “get” that art was a thing in a place that you could look at and feel something about. There was plenty of graffiti scattered across the city that fit the bill. His memory flashes had been getting worse. Some of the old Predacon gang tags tugged at a level of uncomfortable familiarity. Fluorescent signage, faded metal posters, the designs of the buildings themselves… he could look at these things and feel nostalgic for a life he would never experience. The spark in his chest certainly had, but not him— not for himself. Cybertron would stay empty forever if he and the Vehicons did their job right. It was a bitter reality to accept. It also made finding that connection so much more difficult. Art was an experience. How could someone with such a _non-_ admirable experience understand that?

“Urgh. Hm. Thrust…?”

Whatever. The point _here_ was that he and Jetstorm were definitely doing something weird, and the latter seemed determined to make it weirder. That in itself could have been an artform. Jetstorm was damn talented at making a show out of everything he could. It _did_ make Thrust feel something… but building enough momentum to gain that appreciation and understand it still wasn’t easy. The larger picture was _there_ , but honing in on those small details persisted on exhausting. Being Jetstorm’s partner was an effort on its own without all the extra details fuzzing the edges.

He thought about the graffiti artists who had those tags spread across Cybertropolis. They could probably tell the difference between professional enamel sprays and all-purpose sprays. Meanwhile, Thrust could barely tell the difference between Jetstorm being bored or acting on sadism.

_“Hey!”_

The jet in question shoved him in the head to get his attention. Thrust was jarred back to the present when a second violent shove nearly tossed him off the berth. They both shouted and had to scramble to maintain their balance. Jetstorm grabbed him around the arm to keep him upright at the last possible second. Meanwhile, Thrust had to snap his other arm out to catch himself on the edge of the mattresses they had piled on. The old springs groaned in protest. One even popped with a resounding _snap_ under the cushioning.

Jetstorm’s voice twinged an octave higher. “I asked you a question, roller boy! Don’t ignore me!”

The initial panic that surged through Thrust was gone a nanoclick later. Any worry that he had hurt Jetstorm evaporated as he registered the tone of the other Vehicon’s words. He was only irritated: nothing more serious. Good. _Sex_ wasn’t something Thrust imagined himself having much to do with when he was first created, but it was a nice benefit to being alive. Amongst other things. Appreciation for any art set aside, Jetstorm seemed determined to give him a headache over it.

The smaller Vehicon grunted, forcing himself to stop pistoning. He righted his frame back into a comfortable position. “I don’t get what you’re asking.”

“Aurgh! I didn’t say _stop,_ you _—_ urgh!” Jetstorm canted his hips, propping his tail in an attempt to jostle Thrust forward and make him move. The furious glow in his optics lit the space crimson. “You have no class.”

“That’s not nice.”

Jetstorm bucked again, growling a little more forcefully. That frustration propelled his snarl into a furious crescendo. The aerial’s claws started to dig into his back, pressing divots into the metal. Paint was scraped.

“Thrust! Shut up and— hh _mmmm…!”_

The smaller mech nestled his head into the crook of Jetstorm’s throat, resuming his previous pace. The plate underneath the mattresses wasn’t bolted to the floor and rocked in tandem with the metronome motions. “Better?”

A contented sigh was his only immediate answer, connecting smoothly into a contented rumble. Jetstorm had a natural talent when it came to putting a legato to his voice. His valve calipers clamped down around him in an attempt to draw him deeper.

“I wasn’t ignoring you, by the way.” Thrust fell into the new rhythm, roaring his engine. He dragged his facial vents along the outline of Jetstorm's collar. “I got distracted. Sorry.”

“Just shut up and keep your eyes on the prize,” Jetstorm murmured. The larger Vehicon rolled his head back, shuttering his optics closed. “Some of us are trying to enjoy ourselves.”

“What? You think I’m not havin’ fun or something?”

A clawtip tapped Thrust on the top of his shoulder, tracing down, hooking into a transformation seam on his flank. Static was starting to lace his speech again, already dropping two steps lower. Jetstorm got quieter. “You’re the one who said he was distracted.”

Thrust couldn’t keep focused on much of anything as his sensor net started to build a second charge. He tried to relax as his vision briefly wandered upward. A nonsensical image was branded into the wall above their heads in black spray paint. The secrecy needed for their safety during these little “shows” always had them out of reach from the Maximals. Never Megatron, but an effort was made. Abandoned buildings and warehouses with no windows were better than nothing. Still…

“We gotta find a new place,” Thrust rumbled. He reached up to tweak the bottom of a wingtip. “This dump sucks.”

There was no fresh remark from Jetstorm. Maybe it was because the blue mech was getting close enough that he didn’t want to risk a break in the pace again. The flyer was tense this time around, unable to keep his RPM in a single range and firing off his antigrav boosters at random. The less-than-nice surroundings were easy to ignore as he got more involved in the lay— sound _wasn’t_. Jetstorm was damn nice to look at, but so much of what he was came down to hearing. How his words rose and fell depending on his moods. Thrust had found it most noticeable he was telling the truth or not lashing out for the sake of his reputation. His “normal” voice sounded nothing like it did when he was taunting the Maximals or playing up for Megatron.

Jetstorm’s voice was a preoccupied mumble.

Thrust was too embarrassed to admit that he hadn’t understood. He came back to himself, coming up from distractedly listening to the Jetstorm’s fans notch higher. He pulled back just far enough to find the other mech’s sights. “Didn’t catch that.”

“So, you _don’t_ think this is a nice picture you’ve painted for yourself?”

Thrust revved, living up to his namesake and rolling deep. The berth groaned and rocked in tandem with him. The harsh motion caused the metal plate underneath to strike the wall and shake their bodies. Hitting the back of Jetstorm’s valve caused the jet to keen high. His interior lining got hotter, ran wetter. The accent of the note went particularly sharp and held. Good. That meant he liked it. The sound warbled high as Thrust repeated himself, keying his voice in tune on the same scale. Alto on tenor.

“Not sure about pictures,” Thrust admitted, chuckling. He used the opportunity to up their tempo into a cadenza, revelling in the sounds that the other mech made for him. “I think I’m more of a music man, myself.”


	9. Criminal Mischief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cheetor, Jetstorm, and Thrust go looking for energon. Cheetor makes some observations. 
> 
> An AU where Jetstorm takes up Cheetor's offer to join up with the Maximals during Fallout (2x01). Thrust is absolutely not happy about this.

“The door’s locked,” Cheetor said.

Jetstorm didn’t say anything for what must have been a full ten seconds. Which was amazing, because asking the jet to stay quiet for any length of time in single digits should have been next to impossible. Experience had taught him that it was just in the guy’s nature: the pinnacle of every facet of his personality that was anti-Silverbolt. The sensation of that silence was one of the most uncomfortable things Cheetor had experienced in his lifetime— and he once had the luxury of being strung up by Tarantulus. Another good contender for comparison was when he went through his less than “comfortable” Transmetal 2 configuration… not like anyone who went through that process had a good time, anyhow.

Cheetor was remembering how bad Blackarachnia had it when Jetstorm finally turned to look at him. It was a slow, deliberate movement that immediately had the cat on edge. Their optics caught and held, purple on red. Cheetor wondered if he was having the transorganic equivalent of a stroke.

Jetstorm was deadpan. “You’re kidding.”

Okay. So this wasn’t a stroke, but Cheetor still felt the awkward twinge that settled between them. He was also starting to regret doing this without a second body as backup. The only reason he hadn’t was because he knew he could only push the other Maximals so hard— all things considered, he wasn’t going to risk pushing any harder than necessary. It had been a hard night for everyone. With Optimus gone, he had to… tread lightly. Taking command of such a small group of survivors had proven hard enough when it was five of them. It didn’t matter that they had won the Spark War. Now that there were only four left, tensions were higher than ever.

Well. Six. Jetstorm and Thrust joining with them less than a megacycle ago was a surprise. Cheetor hadn’t seriously expected them to take up the invitation.

“Why don’t you both join us? We don’t hold grudges,” he had said, partially because he felt like he had to. _Optimus_ would have extended the olive branch, right?

The others had gone back to the Oracle in an attempt to commune with the supercomputer. Finding out how to continue their mission without Primal was definitely a priority. With that being said, they weren’t quite willing to let the remaining Vehicon generals near their base… not yet, anyways. Which was fair. Neither was Cheetor. Instead, he and the two ex-generals took to looking for energon. Refurbishing their rations seemed like a good second priority, and a good way to keep the newest members of their party occupied. A lingering energy readout that Rattrap had been eyeing weeks earlier suggested there was energon in the warehouse district. Finding a stockpile that Megatron had never gotten to use would be a much needed stroke of luck.

Their scouting party of three arrived at the storage yard close to sunrise, faint streaks of orange streaking the sky above Cybertropolis’ skyscrapers. Except, Primus forbid, the damn maintenance entrance was locked.

“No.” Cheetor tried the access panel again when he found his voice. “Not joking. No way to get it open without a corresponding access code. Not unless _you_ have one.”

Jetstorm scoffed. “Menial labor is for drones.”

Which was code for _no, frag off._ Fair enough. Generals or not, Megatron wouldn’t have trusted anyone will free will to have access to a stockpile like this— not even his own guys. “Whatever. We should try the front and see if we can get past docking shutter.”

Jetstorm’s shoulder mounted canons shifted into their forward firing position.

Cheetor had to resist smacking the jet’s arms down. The one thing he knew he absolutely could _not_ do, beyond pushing the rest of the Maximals beyond their limit, was try his luck with the large Vehicon. There was no helping raising his voice, though. “You out of your mind? You try to put plasma through that door, and you risk setting the whole place sky high!”

The Vehicon revved in agitation. “No use trying to get in through the front _either_ , furball. Those blast doors are twice as thick. You got any better ideas?”

Unfortunately no. Blast-proof shutters at the unloading zones meant that Jetstorm was right. The best way in was through this door— the question being _how_. Depots like this usually had valuable materials under wraps, making high-profile security measures a necessity. This same stretch of warehouses would have once been used for storing ship parts in the time before Megatron’s takeover. After bowing out of the Maximal Command Security Force academy, Cheetor was almost sure this was the same lot where he had first met Rhinox. The pilot’s guild he had joined sent him to pick up the _Axalon’s_ navigation chip with their assigned mechanic. So many of his memories were still off-kilter after coming back to Cybertron. He wondered if he would ever get them all back.

(Primus. Poor Rhinox. He was going to miss him just as much as Optimus.)

“Seriously, though.” Jetstorm had gone back to staring at him. “You’re joking about the whole locked door thing, right?”

“Nothing to joke about— what are you getting at?” Cheetor raised an optic ridge. For emphasis, he tried his servo on the console again. The security buzzer gave a negative chime in retaliation. _“You_ want to give it a shot? _Without_ weapons?”

The notion looked as though it personally offended the jet. Jetstorm scoffed and raised a clawed servo to his chassis. The pearl-clutching mime looked ridiculous on him. “Oh, please! I don’t need to, pussy cat… Thrust!”

The bike in question was lingering a little way away, still pouting. Another oddity of the night: the maroon mech had been sulking ever since Jetstorm agreed to join up with them. _Everyone_ had been surprised, yeah, but Thrust may as well have been properly _upset_ about the whole arrangement. The motorcycle had been moping in vehicle-mode for the entire time since. He was currently parked next to another warehouse across the lot, not looking at either one of them.

“Oh, for the love of— _Thrust!”_ Jetstorm squared himself up and braced his claws on his hips, elbows akimbo. “Don’t _ignore_ me!”

At this point, it would have been impossible even if he tried. Jetstorm shouted for the bike’s attention two more times before Thrust relented. He transformed and rolled over. Cheetor could tell by the way he was hunched that he was still angry. His visor shutter narrowed as he briefly crossed sights with Cheetor. Yeah. Definitely mad.

Jetstorm raised an optic ridge at the bike.

Thrust glared at him. Then he put himself into reverse and backtracked several meters away, still glaring.

“Well, _that_ was helpful.” Cheetor scoffed. “Now can we please focus on—?”

If there was one thing that Cheetor missed about having his own vehicle-mode, it was the horsepower. He’d been a sporty Cybertronian speedster before getting his beast-mode. Something about revving up your engine hit different when you had a set of wheels to roll on, but any jealousy he might have felt towards Thrust was dashed as self-preservation kicked in. The Vehicon lunged from zero to sixty in a matter of seconds once he was far enough back, angling himself shoulder first. Cheetor had to stagger backwards to avoid having his pedes run clear over.

Thrust took the entire frame with him. The door curved from the tremendous pressure, splitting the magnetic strip and cracking the deadbolt. The entire wall was jilted as a result. The smaller Vehicon kept going and ended up crashing sprawled on the floor halfway into the warehouse. The motion sensors triggered the lights to flare to life.

Thrust groaned as he struggled to sit up. “Ow. Ow. Ow.”

“Roll it off, roller boy.” Jetstorm was cackling as he floated in through the ruined threshold. “Have I ever told you that you’re my favorite battering ram? No need for access codes when you have brute force!”

Cheetor only followed when he was sure that no alarm system was going to be triggered in their wake. Even before the rude introduction of the Vehicons to Cybertron, security drones were common installations where theft was a risk. No such force greeted them this time— the next go around, they might not be so lucky. Any thought of berating the two was dashed for the same number of reasons. For one, he still wasn’t going to push his luck. Jetstorm and Thrust had… been through enough that day, too. If Cheetor _really_ intended to keep the generals under wraps and on their side, he could only push as hard as he was willing to push the rest of the Maximals. Primus willing, they would all end up working together as a single unit. Successfully. Maybe. _This_ seemed to be a good start, criminal breaking-and-entering aside.

Second: there was the brief moment where Jetstorm stopped, reached down, and actually helped Thrust up. So many of their interactions with the Maximals had been while they were on opposite sides of the battlefield. Cheetor hadn’t realized that there had been a genuine comradery between the two ex-generals.

Then Jetstorm tried to shove him down again. Playful or not, Thrust attempted to deck him square in the head. At least he had stopped pouting.

Jetstorm hummed. “See? I knew you couldn’t stay mad at me forever.”

“Whatever. Just don’t go trading me in for the Maximals.” Thrust dusted himself off, glaring at a fresh dent he had managed to put in his chassis. “Bad enough you let the spider get close enough to _touch_ _you_ like that.”

“Hmph. Nothing for you to worry about, biker boy.” Jetstorm ascended, taking the opportunity to examine the massive stack of refined energon cubes closest to him. “I’m not already _[friends](https://youtu.be/FT-LJ6W6qcQ?t=537) _with the Maximals.”

“You guys are the worst,” Cheetor said, but couldn’t offer the exact reason when pressed further. He didn’t try too hard.


	10. Crooked Feathers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At the end of a bad night, Thrust finally finds Jetstorm.
> 
> An AU where the events of In Darkest Knight (2x04) play out with less catastrophic results— unless you’re Jetstorm. Trauma leaves no room to appreciate how things could have been worse.

The acid rain was particularly bad this time. Not quite paint searing, but it left his sensor net tingling with an uneasy vibration against his plating. The roads were slick where the chemical reaction brought oil stains bubbling to the surface. His tire treads were already balding.

Blackarachnia hadn’t followed him. Good. She had done enough.

It was safe to say that things could have been going better. No one could have accounted for Megatron’s postgame revival, but that was hardly the most serious of those arisen issues: Thrust _loathed_ having to work for him again. As upsetting as initially being out of a job had been, he had gotten a taste of freedom. He _hated_ losing it. Trying to pump the Maximals full of lead was different when you were doing it for yourself instead of some guy lording over you. There hadn’t been much of a choice for them in the matter, though. The presence of Megatron’s spark in the Grand Mal still put the warlord in direct connection with the Citadel’s supercomputers. Their transmits remained in connection with the drones and their corresponding generals. Trying to ignore Megatron would get them nowhere— Tankor’s _one_ display of defiance as himself had earned him an all-expenses paid memory wipe. He never recalled enough self-awareness to try it again.

Both of them been through too much together to risk it. They had no choice but to go crawling back. Jetstorm did most of the grovelling for them. Thrust just tried his best not to let his vocalizer slip by telling Megatron to fuck off.

The rekindling of the war with the Maximals had done more than put a damper on their freedom, too. The removal of whatever gloves Megatron had been wearing led to Optimus Primal’s crew doing more of the same. They were being more guerrilla than usual. Fights involved less time retreating and more time standing their ground. Sometimes those fights came with legitimately victorious results. The added hazard of Savage wandering around made even basic patrols a living nightmare. He knew it was only a matter of time before someone got hurt. Before Blackarachnia built up enough nerve to stop _asking_ Jetstorm to join her with the Maximals and—

Thrust braked hard as a line of broken windows shimmered above him. The lack of traction on his tires nearly caused him to skid out onto the sidewalk and into a line of empty storefronts. Still, his gaze stayed upward. He never would have seen the shattered glass if lightning hadn’t illuminated the jagged points. Fresh energon glistened at the edges. Jetstorm must have lost lift and crashed, dragging himself across the building before finding his balance again.

Caught against the serrated pieces were a dislodged cluster of crooked feathers.

“Frag,” Thrust murmured. “Damn it.”

The bike followed his partner’s warped energy signature a distance further. As a precaution, he used extra line of code in his back processes to make sure he wasn’t being followed. Blackarachnia had been disheartened enough that he was sure she wouldn’t, but… he wasn’t going to risk it. Too many risks were already taken between them today. He was an idiot for trying to take on Optimus Primal by himself. Likewise, Jetstorm had been an idiot for following the spider into the sewers on his own. Both of them should have known better than to let their guards down. Thrust was only able to follow Jetstorm’s trace indicators over an active beacon, too. It meant that the jet was purposely trying _not_ to be found— a good strategy to follow as he tried to keep widow off his tail. Unfortunately, it forced Thrust to run circles around the city for the better part of a megacycle, trying to pinpoint exactly where the injured robot had hauled himself off to. It allowed enough time pass for storm clouds to settle and a cold front to push in. By the time he finally realized the broad signal had the hydroplant in its center, all traces of orange had been smothered out of the sky behind a layer of black thunderheads.

The plant itself was a massive structure that fed most of Cybertropolis with auxiliary power and water processing. Twenty stories tall with several acres of campus surrounding it, accentuated by the thirty-story waterfall beneath and the narrow catwalks above its gorge. Thrust continued over a line of these ramps to the other side of the river and out of the factory’s working lot. The grounds fed into the housing sector adjacent. Jetstorm’s _active_ beacon finally revealed itself between a line of apartments and the hotel they had been using as their hideout.

In hindsight, he should have realized that the first place Jetstorm was going to go was _home._

Thrust transformed at the mouth of the alley between these two buildings and slowly rolled in. The lamp mounted on the exterior of the hotel flickered yellow from a bad filament. He turned his headlamp off. Another worrying set of energon streaks were smeared against the wall. Claw impressions gouged in the metal revealed where a Transformer had struggled to keep their balance.

“Storm?” He eased forward with his weapons already switched to safety. “It’s me. Spider’s gone. You’re gonna be okay.”

At first there was no movement. Apart from the rain feeding down the rusted pipes, pooling where the concrete dipped between the cracks and potholes, the gutter remained silent. The trench narrowed as he pressed further in, and Thrust's own shadow added to the blanket of darkness. Then he saw the outline of a body tuck itself further against the back wall. Partially hidden behind a recycling tank, curled over itself. The energy signature warbled. That pitch between distress and gross horror told him all he needed to know.

“I’m coming in, okay?” Thrust rolled forward slower, arms raised in submission. “What do you need me to do?”

Jetstorm’s voice was hoarse. “Go— _away.”_

Which wasn’t going to happen, obviously. He paused only as a civility, waiting for any string of additional protest before easing further in. Then he rolled over something underfoot. Not garbage… something else. Thrust ticked back in reverse and glanced down to get a better look. In the low light feeding down the gutter, the quill points of those mangled feathers were still drenched in energon.

“We gotta get you out of the rain,” Thrust said. He kept his voice even— something that came easier than expected, given the circumstances. “Fraggin’ gross out here. Hot shower will make you feel better and get any leftover gunk off you.”

It was pitch black at the back of the alley. The smell of rot from the recycling unit hung heavy. Adding to that stench was the odor of transorganic flesh that had been exposed to the rain for too long. Jetstorm was going to have some nasty chemical burns after this. The bike lingered around the side of the dumpster, keeping his vision straight at the wall beside the body hiding there. It was a courtesy more than anything— if Jetstorm wasn’t ready to show himself, then he wasn’t going to force him to.

The flyer stayed was curled over himself, shaking worse as Thrust stopped next to him. A kinked wing with patches of missing contour feathers raised up to shield him. Neither mech said anything for almost another full cycle.

“Hey. Storm.” Thrust reached his arm down, still not looking at the other Vehicon. “Look at me. Please.”

Jetstorm finally _did_ look up after that. The red shimmer from his optics illuminated the darkness as his wing lowered. That lingering stare was enough permission granted for Thrust to meet gazes with him. The spider had been right— it was still his face, even if the rest of him had been mostly hybridized. Not quite reformatted. It didn’t even seem like he had completed a full beast-mode scan. The jet had done well to tear himself free from the spider’s webbing before the damage was too severe. To think that he could have…

For the first time, Thrust’s confidence faltered. It had nothing to do with the other Vehicon’s appearance.

“It’s still _you_ , right?” Thrust moved his arm closer, feeling the faintest pangs of terror jump down his backstrut. “Jetstorm?”

Jetstorm looked away. He stared at Thrust’s extended arm. Those piercing red optics were glazed over.

“Yeah,” he murmured. His voice was still hoarse from screaming. “It’s still me— for what that’s worth.”

“A lot.” Thrust felt those pangs immediately become replaced with relief. His voice almost cracked as it lowered to a whisper. “It’s worth way more than you think it is. Don’t ever imply it’s not.”

They didn’t move for a long time. The rain built into a torrential downpour as the worst of the squall passed overhead. There was [a sound of thunder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder). Gradually, Jetstorm reached up to touch Thrust’s arm— squeezing three times. Two of his talons had been altered at the end to be much more hooked, semi-transparent with visible quicks. His chest rose and fell from the new set of transorganic lungs forced onto him.

“We’ll get through this.” Thrust said, and absolutely meant it. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Jetstorm laughed. Quiet but still recognizable. It was still definitely _him_ under the feathers and soaked down. He shifted to allow both of his wings to unfurl to a more comfortable posture. Open. So many of the grey feathers had been broken or pulled out in their entirety, but they _would_ heal. “You’re unbelievable. You know that, biker boy?”

“Yeah.” Thrust held out his servo again to give the mech a leg up— now that he had legs. “I’ve been told.”


	11. Sons of Iapetus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When it comes to load bearing surfaces, it’s all about weight distribution.
> 
> What happened to Jetstorm and Thrust at the end of Survivor (1x10), anyway?

There was the sensation of pivoting forward as he jolted back to awareness.

First came the feeling of shock. Electric connections fired off through his frame as they regained charge, causing his battle computer to surge to life with it. It was an angry little reminder that he still had a fight left to finish— even if he couldn’t immediately remember what that fight was. Next was the unlocking of his kinetics. Stasis lock lifted and allowed the springs in his joints to unlatch, flinging them into free rotation. Last came his body’s sudden propulsion upward against gravity. His barest survival programming dictated that immediate motion was necessary. It stained his backstrut and snapped his neck forward with the weight of his helm. The whiplash of it caused his processor to swim.

The power allocation necessary to control his voice box finally returned. His own shout sounded muted to him. “Aaa _urgh!_ Not _again…!”_

He’d been conked out cold more times than he cared to admit in the past few weeks. Never as a result of his own bad judgement, of course. He could fly circles around everyone and _anyone_ like nobody’s business, but a single misplaced idiot could do wonders to mess up his timing— like getting too close to the kid bat and enduring a hard energy drain. There was also the time he had an entire elevator dropped on him… whatever. The little details weren’t important. What _was_ important was the problem at hand: that these Maximals were getting craftier with their methods of dropping him like one of his own drones.

The newest problem _this time_? He couldn’t see a damn thing.

The temporary lapse in his memory (and ringing audio receptors) aside, he was definitely awake. Which was… fine. It meant that no one had managed to kill him yet— always preferable to the alternative. The obnoxious little reboot chime he had gotten so _unfortunately_ accustomed to was enough indication that he was conscious and alert, but that was all. His overlay displays were offline and indicating some kind of readout error. Had he been hit in the head? A basic accessing of his task manager indicated that his optics were marked as online, but it was too dark to see past the glow of his own lenses.

He realized too late that he had kept lunging forward in his bid to sit up. His center of balance was thrown too far left as a consequence. A flailing correction was all that kept him from falling onto his side. Jetstorm wasn’t exactly made for _sitting_ , which made him even angrier that he had been knocked on his back at all.

His voice still sounded too soft. Either something was wrong with his voice box, or his hearing was shot. “I can’t see _anything!”_

Thrust’s engine revved somewhere close by. Its distinct rumble was also strangely soft. The vibration it carried shot straight through the floor and up through Jetstorm’s body. “Stop shouting. Let me try my light again.”

It was of little comfort that Thrust was stuck here with him. What the frag had happened to them? Jetstorm scrambled to do a second systems diagnostic. He leered into the dark as he ran the necessary protocols, feeling the flexmesh on his mask twist. His forced reboot only gave him a basic outlook of what functions he had working. Never anything in explicit detail, such as the status of non-essential functions: vision among them. The manual diagnostic at least managed to jumpstart his backup memory dump… urgh. Megatron was going to be _slagged_ when he heard that they had let Nightscream get away from them like that. Additional punishment was almost a certainty, considering that his egghead diagnostic drone may have suffered damage during the restoration chamber explosion. Frag.

The full diagnostic came back. His optics were fine. A proximity scan indicated to him that the bat’s supersonic screech had caused the cave to destabilize. Some kind of cave-in was inevitable with all the shooting they had been doing down there. The subsequent collapse had dropped them more than twelve meters into another underground chamber. The “worst” of any actual damage incurred hadn’t happened in the fall at all— his audials were toast. Partial blowouts in both inner conductors had warped the pathways to his sound processor. A full workup would be necessary to restore functionality beyond standard self-repair. In the meantime, Jetstorm would stay half-deaf. Several transformation seams were also filled with pebbles and in need of a reset before he could phase into his jet mode. There was even a fuel leak in one of his flight engines. His computer wouldn’t tell him which. _Frag_.

A burst of light finally revealed where he was in the cave. He was on the ground, splayed out in the dirt, surrounded by rocks in a tomb formed by rubble. The length of his body almost spanned the same distance of the room in circumference. Dust was still billowing around him in the receding glow. A second flash allowed him to finally catch a glimpse of Thrust’s outline beside him. Jetstorm twisted around for a full view. The other mech’s torch flickered between white hot to dull yellow as he tried to bring it on a third time too many. It flared in its death throe before the filament burnt out for good.

It was just enough lighting for Jetstorm to see that Thrust was _holding up the damn ceiling._

The jet shouted. That barest self-preservation programming dictated for a second time that motion was necessary. He immediately lunged up on his sputtering turbines, moving to brace himself against the slate above them.

“Wait!” Thrust’s optic visor went wide. “Don’t—!”

The reason for Thrust’s panic became clear. As Jetstorm dug his talons into the rock and pushed _up,_ he exceeded the other general’s height. A catastrophic chain reaction followed. Whatever force Thrust had been exerting to keep the ceiling from crashing down was displaced. Jetstorm felt consequential shift in the boulder’s heft as he pushed against it. He didn’t have the strength in his arms necessary to keep airborne. His flight array and antigravs met their match and crumpled to the burden. Ten sheer metric tons pushed back against him.

Jetstorm went down onto the knee cuff in his tail. Hard. The ball joint at the bend shattered like glass. He _howled_.

Thrust was quick to compensate. He angled himself forward to take the majority of the weight on his shoulders. Spreading his arms allowed him to better distribute the pressure, reaffirming his posture. His engine roared. The bike’s shoulder joints groaned ominously. His tire blew out and caused his already warping rim to sink into the soil.

It felt like an eternity later before the slab above them stopped groaning. As those ten metric tons settled on their newfound pillars, the silence became unbearable.

Thrust grunted. His face was inches away, visor shade lowered to make his optic display a narrow slit. “Never mind.”

Jetstorm struggled to keep his voice in check. He didn’t have legs, but having to endure that much compression on his broken joint might as well have been the equivalent of hobbling on a snapped kneecap. He kept shouting. At least half his hearing gone at least meant he couldn’t give himself a headache, right? Once he was finished swearing up and down…

“Fantastic! This is just _great!”_ Punctuating his anger with a proper conversation starter seemed appropriate. “How the frag are we supposed to get out of here _now?”_

“We don’t.” Thrust turned his head, trying to twist his neck into a comfortable position. It wasn’t working. He settled for keeping his helmet at a tilt, stretching the supports in his shoulders to keep from getting too sore. He huffed as he struggled to lower his RPM. “Gotta wait for Tankor or the drones to dig us out. Already sent up an emergency signal while you were offline.”

As much as Jetstorm hated to admit it, their dialog was a decent enough distraction from the unyielding crush on him. He grunted, similarly struggling to find a comfortable position without shifting too far. The most he could manage was splaying his wings down and back to keep the sensitive tips from scraping rock. He met Thrust’s visor. The glow from both their optical arrays made for an orange-red glow through the swirling dust. “How long was that?”

“Thirty cycles. Give or take.”

The entirety of Jetstorm’s HUD finally came back online— it had certainly taken its damn time! The majority of the newest warnings that were popping up were from his broken joint. Lucky for them that there were enough inner-wall supports to keep the whole passage from crushing them. There was also a new problem to take under consideration: ventilation. Neither one of them needed to _breathe_ in the traditional sense, but Jetstorm’s less than brilliant intervention had caused their tomb to become even more enclosed than before. His scanners were indicating a severe lack of aeriation. Jetstorm could burn relatively clean. Thrust couldn’t.

They were going to run out of cool air to keep their internals from cooking in less than three megacycles.

“I’m going to rip out the kid’s _throat_ the next time I see him,” Jetstorm griped. Managing his pain was getting easier as he once considered the alternative— being in pain meant he was still alive. “I’d like to see him try that stunt a second time.”

“Assuming him and Optimus didn’t get crushed with us.” Thrust sputtered as more dust clogged his vents. “You okay?”

“I’ll be better when I get _out_ of here! Urgh! This is— I can’t even see in front of my damn _face!”_

Jetstorm could feel himself getting worked up, which actually might have been an advantage to them. Thrust had admitted to him in the past that he was terrified of the dark. A mix-up with his software had left him temporarily blind after coming off his activation slab. It couldn’t have been a pleasant experience. Neither could have been holding up all that bulk in the dark for so long before he came back online. Jetstorm wanted to imagine his squawking made for a decent diversion. Thrust certainly seemed calm, under the circumstances.

(Not that he _cared_ or anything.)  
  
(Not at all.)  
  
(Sure.)

What Thrust must have been lacking visual stimuli, his audio processing was working overtime to compensate. _“What?”_

Jetstorm repeated himself, louder. Thrust must have had his hearing ruined, too.

“Don’t get your turbines in a twist.” The bike grunted, twisting his head around again. He was looking increasingly uncomfortable. “Just whatever you do, don’t move. I can’t hold this on my own anymore.”

There was another groan somewhere above them. Residual echoes of the consequence from Jetstorm’s meddling. The jet didn’t feel a change in the dispersal on his shoulders, but Thrust made a _sound_. Not quite a whimper— something else. A haunting thought crossed the jet’s mind as he looked up and tried to peer past the dark. The pocket of rubble they were trapped in had a slanted angle. Which meant…

“Biker boy?” Jetstorm felt his internals knot. “How much are you holding up on _your_ side?”

“Don’t ask me that.” Thrust’s visor shade lowered. The warble in his tone suggested whatever focus he had so far maintained was failing. “Talk to me about anything else— just not _that.”_

It wasn’t possible for Jetstorm to move and better match the effort being put out by the other Vehicon. He was firmly stuck. There wasn’t enough power in his body without functioning flight gear to gain lift, and his antigravs only worked to support his own mass.

“We’re gonna be stuck here for a while,” Thrust admitted, trying to distract himself— and not doing a very good job. His growing discomfort was becoming palpable. “It could have been worse. My back could have given out ages ago, right?”

“Yeah.” Jetstorm felt terror surge with him, lighting up those electric connections in his framework once more. He wasn’t scared of the dark, but the thought of both of them not making it back to the surface was making his own phobias creep in. Finding further distraction from their situation might not have been a bad idea… “What was up with the activation code change tonight? _Accelerate?”_

“I thought you might like it.” Thrust chuckled. Absolutely humorless. His voice knotted. “Keep going.”

“I don’t. _Overdrive_ is better.” Jetstorm leaned in, attempting one last time to make himself comfortable. It didn’t work. Even if he wasn’t holding his fair share physically, he could exert necessary support elsewhere. Time to buckle down until one of their empty-headed drones or Tankor decided to dig them out. “Sure thing, Atlas.”


	12. Wanderers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The lair might be new but it’s not exactly… great. Still, Jetstorm can find affection in the particulars despite his larger-than-life personality. A hole in the wall is still better than whatever the widow might be planning. Also, Thrust is a cuddler.

Rattrap had found their most recent hideout. That meant that Blackarachnia would find it, too.

Packing it in and relocating never got easier. There was always going to be a level of frustration with the moves when they needed to happen— even when they promised themselves that they wouldn’t become too invested in any one place. Neither of them had personal effects besides their own bodies, either. Any sense of loss they felt had less to do with being displaced and more with the forfeiture of what they could call _theirs_. Emotional attachment stung when you had to tear away. That feeling of wasted potential bore a tremendous weight when you had nothing else to carry.

(Electing to leave the Citadel was by their own choice, though. It was a base. Nothing… more. Megatron’s death made it obsolete as anywhere worth hanging around. The labyrinth was too damn big to be a good den without working defenses.)

(The option to choose where they could go also brought the recognition that they finally earned their freedom. They were indentured to no one but themselves.)  
  
(No one in their sound mind would be upset over the loss of _debt,_ right?)

Their first refuge was in the apartment complex next to the hydroplant. It had been used as a safehouse for them in the past, so making it a permanent residence went without saying. It was the perfect spot. Fortified, private, and needing only minimal configurations. They had an endless power supply once they got one of the old water generators working. As long as the river kept flowing over the millwheel, living on a dead planet meant nothing. The factory campus was close enough to a scrapyard and galleria to make for perfect scavenging— an oasis in a wasteland.

The arrangement lasted less than a month. Jetstorm was the one who found the first webs suggesting that Blackarachnia was stalking them. It tore open a wound that neither Vehicon realized they had. Their last one-on-one encounter with her had ended up with their shell programs being overpowered by their borrowed sparks… and now there weren’t droves of drones that could come to their rescue with copies of the Vector Sigma key. There was no telling how lasting the effects of the transorganic sludge would be if it was absorbed into their bodies again. Regaining control from Waspinator and Silverbolt might not be possible. They wouldn’t risk it.

Losing the war was one thing. So was losing their home, but _themselves?_ That was non-negotiable. Jetstorm and Thrust abandoned the hydroplant.

Their second refuge had been at the hollowed B4-Y Maximal power station. Holing up in the night shift barracks was a steep downgrade from their last arrangement. There wasn’t even a working washrack. The place had definitely [seen some action](https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Maximal_Power_Station_B4-Y), too. Explosion craters blasted into the asphalt suggested it had been blown up at some point, then partially rebuilt before Megatron’s takeover. It was old scars and old news compared to the sorry state of the rest of Cybertron. Sorrier still was the reality of their new hideaway’s extended amenities. The nearest scrapyard was seventeen kilometers through broken terrain. The closest downtown section of Cybertropolis had all but been levelled during a skirmish that the Maximals had with Tankor early in their rebellion, adding more scarcity to supply runs. The only power they could get was from a single generator in the basement that kept fritzing out. An _entire corpse_ fell out of a storage closet on top of Jetstorm when he went looking for a latent energon signal. The poor Maximal idiot had stowed himself away after the virus took hold and expired in a janitor’s closet-turned-tomb.

Two weeks later, Thrust spotted the first strands of webbing close to one of their patrol routes. Strung up between two barren energon towers into intricate netting, generously disguised. Now Blackarachnia’s motives were clear. The spider had learned one of Jetstorm’s landing routes and was trying to snare him. She hadn’t been lying when she said she was through pleading with him— Blackarachnia _was_ going to bring back Silverbolt, and it _was_ going to be by force.

Jetstorm suggested that they stand their ground and fight this time.

One disastrous confrontation later, they cut their losses and made a run for it. Thrust rolled with a limp for days. The fire from the station’s wreckage smoldered for weeks more.

Four more moves later, and they found themselves on the opposite side of the city and had to dodge Savage the whole way across. The dumb lizard gave them the run around before they were able to avoid him outright— his territory had expanded since their last encounter. Inconvenient as it was to be in the center of the monster’s stomping grounds, it made for a possible deterrent against the Maximals.

“Except for Nightscream,” Jetstorm said, venomously.

“The kid’s not a rat like Rattrap.”

“Are you— do you even _listen_ to yourself when you run your voice box, biker boy? He is _literally_ a rat. With _wings.”_

Thrust sighed. “You know what I mean.”

Jetstorm didn’t. Unless there was some insight to the kid that Thrust had that he missed, the conversation only served to annoy him even more. The larger Vehicon hefted up another piece of busted sheet metal, waiting impatiently for Thrust to bolt the rest of the damn barricade into place. They didn’t speak for the rest of the night.

The hotel they settled for was decrepit, marked with condemnation signage and surrounded with broken chain link. Schematics in one of the construction trailers suggested that there were plans to knock it over and expand the adjacent freeway. Construction had already begun to connect a new off-ramp to one of the lower suspended roads. Now the machines to work the assembly stood abandoned, rusted or otherwise falling apart from exposure to Cybertron’s elements.

It was almost daybreak when they finished fortifying their new position. One entrance, one exit, and one emergency escape route as backup. There were so many holes in the place that finding a section of the building worth defending was an effort by itself. From there, it was barricaded accordingly. Whatever supplies were available on hand were accounted for. They figured out what they would need and made plans to secure supplies later— wherever that might be. The closest mall was a crater and the nearest scrapyard was mostly empty shells. Cannibalizing actual corpses for parts was… well. They would cross that road when they got to it. The less they had to scavenge at all with Savage in the same area, the better. Finding enough energon to support their fuel needs was a major concern. In the meantime, Thrust had figured out how to reroute power from the maintenance junction across the street to the hotel’s superstructure. No lights, but the cooling system and one power outlet was working. For now.

They selected their personal space that at least had all four walls standing. Then they covered the only window and dragged the sagging mattress into the corner. The peak of summer meant that the days were going to blister, so recharging at the same time would be… safe. No Maximal would be stupid enough to tread the heat, Blackarachnia included. The television only played static but it made for decent lighting. The bike couldn’t stand the dark, and Jetstorm was _not_ going to tolerate the mech sleeping with his headlamp on again.

The jet was on his back, dozing off, when Thrust came back into the room from his last check around building. He barricaded the door behind him. Old habits continued to die hard with his grounder.

“What’s the point of having an emergency exit if we can’t get to it, hmm?”

“Least we’ll hear her comin’ if she decides to sneak up on us. No gettin’ through without us noticing.” Thrust pulled away, eyeballing his handiwork before doing a lap of the room. Twice. He was definitely more paranoid than usual. “You can go through the window.”

“It’s a long fall for someone who doesn’t have wings.”

“I said _you.”_ Thrust stopped by the same window, using the tip of a clamp to peer past the makeshift blackout curtain. He was scowling. “I’m not the one she’s after anymore.”

Jetstorm didn’t want to hear it. “C’mere.”

Neither of them was in the mood for the usual co-curriculars. The sweltering air coupled with the anxiety of being in an unfamiliar space had them in the wrong mindset. The drawbridge watchtower was leagues better than _this_ dump. Jetstorm doubted that Thrust could get it up, anyways. Their rations weren’t evenly divided since the jet required a higher intake to run his antigravs, and Thrust was running on fumes. The cycle-general never admit to that kind of weakness, but Jetstorm could tell when he was nearing his limit. A collapse was imminent if something didn’t change. The jet was going to need a decent recharge before he went looking for fuel for him— a dangerous enough task with a certain arachnid trying to catch him in actual snares. 

He was halfway back falling into sleep-mode when his companion changed position. Thrust leaned up and placed his head on Jetstorm’s shoulder, wedged between the nook where his chest curved into a plasma pylon.

“Can I help you?”

“No.” Thrust balanced his chin against the side of Jetstorm’s upper chassis, settling the weight of his helmet against the other ex-general. He stretched the kinetics in his wheel’s shock supports. Hot air hissed through his vents as he tried to relax. It didn’t seem to be working.

The red tint behind the covered window started to bleed into orange. Jetstorm watched with lazy interest as Thrust continued his wind-down routine: an amalgamation of working out the kinks in his hydraulics while trying to get comfortable. He stretched his arms out over across the blanket they had found, repeatedly flexing the ends of his clamps against the fleece. Over and over, rhymical—

Jetstorm nudged him. “You’re stimming.”

Thrust snapped his arm back. His clamps wrenched shut. “It’s keeping you up.”

“It’s keeping _you_ up.” Jetstorm reached across, dragging the mech’s arm back into position. “You’re going to get yourself caught on the fabric like last time.”

“Don’t think I can recharge, anyhow.”

“You’re overthinking it, wheels.” Jetstorm rocked his head back to look at the ceiling. He hoped the other mech couldn’t see his glare. “It’s not so bad.”

“Yeah. Not so bad.” Thrust’s bitter skepticism was thick enough to claw through. “Sure.”

Both were correct in their own respects, but neither was willing to delve further into the conversation. They were both exhausted— one of them more than the other, obviously. In less than a cycle, Jetstorm could hear the other mech’s systems shutting off. Starting with a distinct whirling down of the cooling fans in his CPU, winding down. Their helmets were so close that the flyer could hear each click as certain processes switched into suspension.

Thrust shifted his head again, tilting it against the crook of his partner’s shoulder. His visor shade was halfway lowered. His optic sensor lights had partially rolled up to be eclipsed.

Jetstorm was too tired for their usual banter. “Watch the paint. You’re cute, [Johnny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wild_One)— but not _that_ cute.”

Thrust murmured something unintelligible in retaliation. He untangled his arm from the nest of blankets again, slinging it higher over Jetstorm’s exposed stomach. He twitched his arm three times against the flexmetal while minding the spoiler fins. The bike’s visor shutter had closed completely. His engine idled as he drifted off. He was snoring less than a cycle later.

“Urgh.” Jetstorm shifted his weight, making sure he had enough room to recline high enough for a decent half-sitting position. He turned against the other Vehicon so there could be more contact between them. He made sure his other shoulder pylon cast a shadow wide enough to keep any stray sunbeams out of Thrust’s face. “Whatever.”

Casual dismissiveness aside, it wasn’t all that bad. The nomadic state of their existence was going to be awful until they found a way to deal with the problem that he was forced to carry around in his chest. No one cared about Waspinator, but not even _Silverbolt_ could be permanent. They would cross that bridge when they got to it.

They still had each other to go to when there was nothing else. Being forced to roam homeless together was better than doing it alone.


	13. Do It Yourself

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thrust gets thrashed within an inch of his life. No one knows why he went to fight the Maximals on his own. In the meantime, Jetstorm and Tankor are left to pick up the pieces… and someone is way, waaay better at their job than the other guy.
> 
> You know how the old saying goes, don’t you?

“Get out of my way before I _murder you!”_

The threat was valid for its purpose but ultimately fell on unreceptive audials. Vehicon drones could react to preserve their “lives” on avoidance-protocols only. Their AIs were too underdeveloped to process vocal prompts in the same way even half-cocked voice recognition could. Not unless a variable for understanding those commands was added… and when they were, they were never particularly complex. “Initiate evacuation sequence” and “open fire” were about as good as you could get. “Get out of my way” and “before I murder you” could not be adequately deconstructed into _“move”_ by your average Vehicon.

By extension, they also couldn’t recognize danger unless the hazard was explicit. An approaching aero-general with his talons extended would never have been perceived as a menace. Not even as every diagnostic drone with an unobstructed view scattered for cover. _They_ understood.

Planetside and astrotime law under the Pax Cybertronia redefined _murder_ after the Great War. Not by much, but the distinction was important. Heavy emphasis on the “non-wartime” part was essential to the new denotation. Anything less made for a serious social dilemma. It made avoiding the awkwardness of Cybertronians integrating back into society after the Great Upgrade so much… easier. Everyone transitioning out of the conflict had killed someone at least once, somehow. With their bare servos or a weapon or didn’t matter. _Your_ survival meant that someone else had died in your place.

Energon stained spark-deep if you made it past the Unicron disaster or the near-tragedy brought by the Swarm. All things considered, Quintesson Judges were a damn bad judge of character on the guilt of their ex-slaves: when it came to killing, no Transformer who lived through the Great War was _innocent_.

He wondered how many articles in the Pax Cybertronia had been shattered by Megatron when he captured the sparks. He wondered how many more he might still break. Given enough time to take his totalitarian extravaganza to the stars, the possibilities were endless. It was a certainty that Transformers either escaped or weren’t on the planet when the virus first spread. Plenty were either in hiding or planning to take back their world. There was no way Optimus Primal and his zoo were the only ones frothing for rebellion… but in time, they would be assimilated like the rest. Could the Spark War be officially considered a _war_ under the old articles in that way? Were those who didn’t survive to have their sparks extracted be considered to have been murdered, or would they be wartime casualties gone unrecorded like so many before them?

Thrust was the wildcard history buff between them, so Jetstorm asked him. Thrust responded by staring at him like he had turned an offensive shade of pink. He was utterly bewildered.

_“What?”_

Hmm. Maybe that was a little wordy. Jetstorm broke it down so his partner might better understand. Thrust was smarter than he was given credit for, but he was also the type that preferred explicit language. No wonder he was so fond of his cycle drones…

“The frag would you ask me all _that_ for?”

There were three reasons. For one, he was genuinely curious. The bike must have picked up _something_ from all those datatracks he had been getting his not-so-malleable servos on… and right under Megatron’s nose, no less! Information harvesting was a taboo subject as far as the temperament of their boss was concerned. Megatron had gone so far out of his way to wipe every major archive on the planet. _Scarcity_ made knowledge a pricy contraband. Jetstorm loved the idea of getting his claws on anything he was told he couldn’t have. Misbehavior looked best dressed in blue.

Thrust shrugged. “Fair enough. What are the other two?”

For two, Jetstorm felt like he might… have a genuine interest in this area. Somehow. Beyond the concept of disobedience for the thrill of it, there was also a nagging sensation that he should already _know_ this information. Part of him sort of did, too. He was able to follow along with Thrust’s explanations surrounding the Pax Cybertronia with some level of fluidity that shouldn’t have been possible. He wondered if his borrowed spark’s latent memories were trying to surface past his shell program.

“Think your spark belonged to law enforcement? A peacekeeping officer?”

Close. “Security at the data archives. I was transferred to an exploration team with my betrothed. She was bacteriologist and environmental engineer about to go tour aboard the _Axalon.”_

 _That_ little hiccup was enough to scare them both into submission. They dropped the subject for a week, but the damage was too far gone. Lingering concerns about Thrust holding onto Silverbolt’s spark were tossed. There was no way that little quip _hadn’t_ been from the Maximal in question. Jetstorm had had zero interest in finding out who he was lugging around, so the forced revelation was infuriating. _My betrothed?_ Revolting. He spent every reboot after that soft-resetting his voice box. The last thing he needed was for the lovesick fool to commit to more unwarranted broadcasting. 

Finally, Thrust reminded Jetstorm that he still hadn’t given him the third reason. It made for a good distraction from any mention of Silverbolt.

“Oh. That’s easy, biker boy.” Jetstorm flexed his talons, revelling in the way that Silverbolt’s spark withered… then slightly swelled with a curious heat. Useless sap or not, the knight-in-tarnishing-armor was starting to warm up to the idea of honorless brutality. Interesting. “I want to make sure all the culling I do counts as _murder.”_

The reality of his intended violence didn’t quite translate the way he hoped. Jetstorm still hadn’t skinned any of the Maximals for himself. A few times he got close, but never close enough. Silverbolt holding him back wasn’t the problem. The _problem_ was that Primal’s crew were reaching a mass index in how well they could dish out their own violence… and right now, they were the ones almost succeeding in the culling.

Thrust was fading faster than he was hanging on. His energy signature had all but washed into obscurity where he was draped over Tankor’s shoulder.

Sure enough, the line of drones blocking the entrance to the Citadel’s west wing weren’t quick enough to respond to Jetstorm’s threat. The control relays may have been failing in the presence of a wounded general. Alternatively, Jetstorm emotions could have been clogging his ability to broadcast clear commands. The reason didn’t matter— only the consequence. The jet extended his claws with a shout and rammed them through the face of the aero drone who failed to move. The sparkless machine’s antigravs failed. It thrashed in a pathetic death throe before going limp.

Jetstorm wanted it to count as murder. He wanted to hurt something and make it _matter_.

“Hurry it up, lugnut!” Jetstorm kept moving, shaking shredded drone gore off his claws. He scowled at the empty shell as it fell. “Let’s get a move on, here!”

The rest of the drones were quicker to strafe out of the way. They parted as their two conscious generals bore through the Citadel corridors. Tankor kept pace behind him Jetstorm as they went. Even with the added weight over his shoulder, the towering brute was still quick on his treads. Megatron’s own beacon was hailing down on top of them, but the urgency of the situation kept Jetstorm on track. Their little emergency needed to be dealt with first. Reporting to the boss was going to have to wait.

Thrust mumbled something incoherent as they came to the shaft elevator leading to the lower levels.

“Shut _up!”_ Jetstorm glanced back and felt his circuits crawl. He plugged in the floor they wanted and left energon spatter on the switches. “Shut up! Let me think!”

The old security wing had two working CR tanks in its hospital quarter. Only one had enough fluid for a sufficient repair cycle. The other had sprung a leak that the diagnostic drones had yet to address, although they had little reason to. It stood half-drained with its error lights flashing an obnoxious red. The units were old tech compared to the much more energy efficient restoration chambers in the same space. They were never going to be a priority when there was so much else they could be doing. Unfortunately, _energy efficient_ wasn’t going to suffice this time around. Thrust was going to need heavy duty repair work if he was going to survive _this_ mess.

Jetstorm blasted his way through the door and Tankor had to dodge under the lip of the busted frame to make it through. The dying Vehicon balanced on his shoulder slipped off and crashed to the floor.

The jet whirled and tossed his arms up. “Are you _kidding me!?”_

“Bike-bot _broken._ No use to fix.” Tankor’s voice had taken on an odd twinge as he spoke. Not as rough. _Smoother_. The huge Vehicon brought himself back to his full height without helping Thrust. “Leave him.”

He had been acting strange recently, but the faintest shift in Tankor’s tone felt particularly… familiar. Jetstorm felt his spark pang again. The presence of a hidden knowledge was palpable. Silverbolt _knew_ something.

“Speak for yourself!” Jetstorm swooped low, hooking his arms under Thrust’s back and pulling as hard as he could. The mech was heavier than he anticipated. Dead weight and then some. Without power allocation to his joints, the cycle-general was almost impossible to lift. _“Help_ me or I’ll tear out what little processor you have left in that thick-plated head of yours!”

Tankor narrowed his visor.

Thrust made a noise. A strangled wheeze crackled his vocalizer full of static. The fall had dislodged something, causing viscous gold fluid to start pooling under his back. His cracked oil tank finally ruptured. It wasn’t a worse injury than the crush damage around his chest, but Jetstorm could already feel the heat kicking up from Thrust’s already struggling engine.

“Hey! Hey, biker boy!” Jetstorm unhitched his arm from under the mech to tap him on the face. “Say something!”

“Told me to… shut up.” Thrust moaned in pain and shuddered. His visor shade lowered. His pilot light sensors were rolling back. “Tryin’ to go into recharge.”

“I changed my mind— and don’t do that.” Jetstorm hooked his arms under the other mech again, resigning himself to doing the heavy-lifting by himself. He heaved upward _hard_ on his antigravs, firing his turbines for extra kick. It seemed to work. “Stay awake.”

The standard restoration chambers were good for power conservation, but never for more serious injuries. Poking one of the Paw Patrol with a stick was one thing. Driving up to all five and goading them into a one-on-five matchup had translated into disaster. Optimus Primal had absolutely _pummelled_ Thrust. His shock supports were shattered. A shredded tire and warped rim would make trying to hold his own weight a torture… it was a miracle that he managed to drag himself back to the highway where Jetstorm found him. Cheetor had left deep gouges in the metal that had eviscerated his internals resting too close to the surface. Puncture holes revealed how many times Nightscream had tried to stick him with an energy drain. Rattrap had tried plugging into the back of his head to do a shoddy hack job at some point— the amount of scraping and solder burns made that clear. No one had exactly given Blackarachnia the heads up that the bike wasn’t lugging her boytoy’s spark. While the spider had tried to do the least damage, Thrust’s battery was still on the fritz from overclocking. She must have sent what should have been her usual grounded blasts straight into his joints. Repeatedly.

Thrust whimpered. His optic sensors found Jetstorm and locked on. Staring straight through him rather than at him. Hollow.

“I know it hurts, biker boy.” Jetstorm ducked and heaved upward, slinging the mech’s arm over his shoulder. The bike dangled helplessly. “Play stupid games and win stupid prizes. Hang on.”

He lifted Thrust onto the CR platform after a struggle. Shouting Tankor down when he was being stubborn was going to get him nowhere. A hard shove allowed Jetstorm to roll the bike onto the center of the lift. He was already bleeding through the grates and dripping energon into the tank solution, staining the color from silver to pink. The jet hovered next to the controls and momentarily found himself clueless— he’d never had to work one of these damn things before, and he hated that he never paid closer attention to when Thrust set the tank for his own repairs. Even if it was impossible to drown your internals on CR fluid, the sensation of having your intake ducts submerged was terrifying. Jetstorm would never understand why Thrust [preferred this kind of machine to the others](https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Waspinator_\(BW\)#Beast_Wars_cartoon).

Another twinge of familiarity. Silverbolt knew. Thankfully, he also knew how to work this kind of apparatus. The _Axalon_ had been outfitted with the CR chamber model that bridged the gap between the older tanks and newer non-liquid based units. Jetstorm brought up the touchscreen and worked his way through the settings module.

Thrust tried to sit up.

“ _Hey!”_ Jetstorm stopped mid-setup and flew up. His massive servo dwarfed Thrust’s back as he pinned him down. “Knock it off! _Enough!”_

Thrust struggled. Then he spat up energon. His vents rattled.

Either he went in now or not at all. Jetstorm looked up and was incensed to see Tankor _still_ hadn’t moved. Useless fragger! “Throw the damn switch! I can’t keep him down and work the panel at once over here!”

Tankor’s voice changed completely. Deeper. The massive Vehicon might not have even been aware he was doing it. [Maybe he was](https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Rhinox_\(BW\)#Beast_Machines_cartoon).

“Do it yourself.”

It was such a shock to his systems that Jetstorm couldn’t speak. Maybe that was for the best. He tended to struggle with when he should zip his vocalizer, but this seemed as good a time as any to practice. He waited for the tank drone general to leave before leaning over to try and get to the controls himself. His arm wasn’t long enough. His talons came within centimeters of grazing the activation command.

Thrust tried to move again. Jetstorm clocked him over the head with the intent to stun him.

Instead, the maroon mech started spasming.

“OH, COME _ON! Seriously!?”_

The seizure had already stopped by the time Jetstorm activated the lift. It lowered on grinding gears that scraped painfully at his audials. Thrust was immersed in the solution and twitched as his ventilation pathways were flooded. Then he tried to sit up again. A brief struggle ensued as the mech's lagging processor struggled to figure out he wasn’t going to suffocate. The cyclist finally went limp after a delay that took too long to settle comfortably with Jetstorm. Too much of what he was looking at was like watching that dead aero drone struggle on his claws. Thrust’s visor shade only managed to lower halfway before his pilot lights went out.

A report came back on the monitor. Jetstorm was too upset to look at it beyond the basic readout. It would be several megacycles before Thrust was stable. It’d be a triple that before there was confirmation of permeant damage.

Jetstorm leaned against the machine and allowed his antigravs to disengage, sliding down. He scowled at the door that Tankor had left through. Between him and the Maximals, he wasn’t sure who he was going to skewer with fresh plasma bursts first. Thrust was fresh for the chopping block, too. Pulling a stunt like what he’d done was deserving of a walloping. He was sure to have given as good as he got, but…

He tried their shared drive. The CR fluid wasn’t a sufficient enough blockade and Jetstorm managed to get ping through. He was hopeful at first. A returning signal came back with a connection error. To his dismay, Jetstorm found he was still locked out. Whatever reason Thrust had to block him, it must have been [damn important](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27688459/chapters/67873489).

He wondered if the articles would have considered Thrust’s death _murder_. He didn’t have his own spark, and neither did Jetstorm. Megatron’s incessant demand that his remaining generals be summoned to his chamber grated on his processor to the point where Jetstorm debated throwing his own blocker up. It was just another rude reminder that they were property: drones with only slightly better AI. Under the Pax Cybertronia, you couldn’t murder tools… but you _could_ murder Maximals. Most definitely.

Misbehavior looked best dressed in blue. So did revenge.

Even if Tankor was no longer in the room with him, Jetstorm felt he owed a reply. “If you want something done _right?_ Absolutely.”

Silverbolt withered.


	14. Our Human Elements

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thaddeus is starting to wonder if he’s head-over-heels for his boyfriend Jeffery, or just plain in over his head. He honestly can’t tell the difference. Life has definitely been interesting since leaving home, for sure.
> 
> Welcome to the year of our lord 1999, in the hell that is our obligatory humanverse AU.

He liked to think he had a pretty decent upbringing.

Growing up as a kid in Red Deer, Alberta had all sorts of perks. Nothing particularly interesting ever happened, but dullness brought safety. He was raised in a Catholic family as the second child between two other sisters. Both houses that his parents owned were close to the local church. The second house they got after his father lost his job was close to the river. It made for great summers spent wading into the shallows on a hot day. Sometimes he would stay out late before dinner just to sit under the local bridge and watch the sun go down. On the bad days when they happened, watching those colors bleed into the dark always gave him hope that things would be better. Other times he would sit there and just crave something… interesting.

Then three sisters became two sisters and one brother— and when it was obvious that his family wasn’t going to stop giving him the cold shoulder and deadnaming him at every goddamn opportunity, he simply stopped visiting. He rode off into one of those sunsets on his first bike and never looked back. At least they saved him the trouble of having a traumatic childhood. This kind of shit was way easier to deal with as an adult.

Thaddeus Barker rolled with the punches as they came, and he had gotten _really_ good at the brooding loner-bit.

Vancouver was a different beast from Red Deer (or even Montreal, where Soucy grew up). Busier and bigger, with all the interesting shit that happened in-between. Sometimes he regretted asking for the excitement, because that was exactly what he got. Thaddeus wasn’t particularly fond of the crowds. Too many people in one place gave him way more anxiety than he cared to admit. Summer tourism packed the place with clueless Americans and just about everyone in Canada who needed to have their license revoked. If it was up to him, he would spend all his time at the garage in Richmond and not even bother crossing the north city line. Fixing every fugly ass Harley that came through the doors was way better than dealing with people… even if it was only busting skulls for a local crime boss on the side. You didn't need people skills for that. Megs paid in cash, but it still wasn't pleasant to look someone in the eye while you beat them bloody with a rusted tire iron.

Jeffery Soucy had other plans, though.

They were already twenty minutes late when the platinum blonde finally exited his apartment. Thaddeus heard his heels clicking before hearing the door slam. As the man leaned over the second-story complex balcony to get a look at him, any stitch of affection that might have been in his gaze evaporated. His trademark scowl stretched thin. Jeffery's nails, manicured with stiletto French tips, curled with his grip over the railing. Thaddeus knew right away that he was in trouble— somehow.

“Urgh! Honestly biker boy, I can't take you out _anywhere!”_ Jeffery waltzed to the stairway, giving Thaddeus an obstructed view of his entire getup. A blue designer aviator jacket with a cardinal red collar. The spandex shirt underneath was a size too small. So were the rubber pants, white and shiny. No wonder it had taken him so long to get ready— how the hell had he managed to get into those? How the hell was he going to get _out?_ Then there was the issue of the boots… “You’re going out dressed like _that?”_

It was a bold fuckin’ statement, to say the least. It wasn’t like they were going anywhere particularly fancy— or somewhere where you might take your family, which would require way less leather on his part. To be fair, _he_ could at least pass as straight. A thug, but _straight_ nevertheless. 

Thaddeus tilted down his shades to glare up at him. “Says the guy dressed in fuckin’ diamond-studded thigh-highs. It’s a bar. We’re not going to a porn shoot.”

“Hey! I’ll have you know that this place is a club, not a bar— and these are _Gucci._ They’re classy.” For emphasis, Jeffery kicked up one of his heels onto the railing to show off. His pants squeaked as the leg went up. New, bright blue, with rimstones going up the sides from the base of the heel to the top hemming. It was wild how he managed to keep his balance like that. Thaddeus wondered where he got the extra dough to pick them up… if he even paid for them in the first place.

“I wore the same thing last time,” Thaddeus said, frowning. “You sure as hell weren’t complain’ then.”

Those heels made Jeffery even taller up close as he descended the concrete staircase. He made his way across the cracked parking lot, still scowling with an equally trademark swagger. It made the height discrepancy between them even more obvious… but there was no denying that he still looked damn good in them. His long strides were so smooth that it was more like a gliding hover.

“You always wear the same thing. You’re _boring_ me!” Jeffery loaded onto the back of the bike and put his hair up in a ponytail. No way was he going to risk ruining his look getting windblown. “What’s wrong with adding some flare to your wardrobe, hmm? Would it kill you?”

“Don’t like to stand out is all,” Thaddeus said. He pushed his visor back up as he straddled the bike, pulling out of the parking lot and onto the main road.

It wasn’t until they got to the first stop sign that Jeffery was able to raise his voice over the roar of the cycle. “Says the fucker driving the loudest goddamn Suzuki in Canada! Put a _muffler_ on this thing!”

Thaddeus revved the engine and laughed at the indignant squawking behind him.

Vancouver had plenty of downtown strips, but the stretch closest to the abandoned Mainframe Productions building was a self-serving favorite. There were plenty of colorful bars to satisfy Jeffery’s unabashedly bad attention span. A wide-enough sidewalk also meant he could slip next to Jeffery and try to go unnoticed. It was near enough to the end of the season to avoid the worst crowds, too. There was ample parking as they pulled in to park.

Thaddeus was only halfway off the bike when Jeffery started pitching a second fit. A Fiat Ritmo in matte black was parked four spaces down.

 _“Beatrice!_ Urgh! Thads, gimmie your keys.”

“I’m not letting you key our ex-girlfriend’s car.” Thaddeus knocked the kickstand into place and looked around. “She’s probably with the kid and Chester. No way they’ll be in the club to bother us. They wouldn’t fit in.”

“Come on! Just a little? She won't even notice— not right away.”

Thaddeus pocketed the keys in the breast of his leather jacket. Then he buttoned the pocket for good measure. “Leave it be, Storm.”

“Boo! Fine! Then _you’re_ buying the first round… _and_ you’re dancing with me!” Jeffery pointed an accusing finger at him as they made their way across the asphalt. Unkempt terrain or not, he was continuing to glide effortlessly on those heels. The rhinestones sparkled under the street lights. “None of this planting yourself in the doorway looking like you’re too cool to get shitfaced. If I wanted to party with someone boring, I'd go hang out with Orion and the rest of his eco-freaks. Our ex-girlfriend included.”

“Still gotta drive us home at the end of the night.” Thaddeus was already putting forty dollars into his boyfriend’s waiting palm. His own hands were rough with black smudges where he’d changed the bike’s oil earlier in the day. The grime under his nails was a sharp contrast to the work Jeffery had had done to his _talons_. “Tip the bartender this time. I only want a beer.”

“Oooh no. No, no. We’re getting frozen cosmos and _shots_. I’ll pay for the hotel. I want drunk sex and room service.”

“Fine.” Thaddeus shoved his hands in his jacket pockets as they crossed the street. So, maybe he _did_ get an influx of cash recently… Megan must have given him extra for a private job. He wondered if it was too rude to ask. “Keep playing nice like this and maybe I’ll take _you_ out more often.”

“Even when I wear stripper heels?”

“Thought you said they were Gucci.”

The sun was setting over the line of buildings as they made it to the sidewalk and took a right. They got a few stares, which was normal. It was a few weeks post-Vancouver Pride, and Jeffery stuck out exactly the way he liked. Always attention-seeking, always a handful. Thaddeus was still on the fence whether he could handle him or not. There was safety in dullness… and despite Jeffery being anything _but_ dull, the risk felt more than worth it. Sometimes it was okay to trust your gut. He’d still be in Red Deer hating himself if he hadn’t done that already. Maybe he would have thrown himself over that same bridge that he used to sit under.

The bouncer recognized them and let them pass. Jeffery's pants and hair lit up under the glow of the blacklights. A popular 80's song was blasting from the speakers spread across two stories of clubbing space packed with bodies. It wasn't until one of the swinging spotlights caught Jeffery in its glare that Thaddeus noticed the back of the designer jacket. Ombre red bleeding into yellow and blue in two neat triangular shapes, like a pair of sunset wings.

Jeffery was already letting down his hair, grinning with feral abandon— just another human in his personal element, flaming bisexuality or otherwise. “Whatever keeps you more interested, sweetheart!”

“Implying I _wouldn’t_ be interested,” Thaddeus murmured, trailing behind as his blonde bombshell strode into Cybertropolis like he fucking owned the place. Watching those colors bleed into the dark always gave him hope that things would _keep_ getting interesting. “Never gonna happen, babe.”


	15. This House of Webs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thrust goes to coordinates that the spider left for him. Under the circumstances, all this sneaking around is feeling less like a private liaison and more like a trap. Maybe he should have told Jetstorm where he was going.
> 
> Based on this Beast Machines promotional image (not from the actual show). Takes place after Revelations Part 3: Apocalypse (1x09). There's a poem for this, too...

“Where are _you_ going?”

“Out.”

“Well! _Someone’s_ in a mood! Feel like giving me a little more than that? Hmm?”

“No.”

The flexmesh on Jetstorm’s mask gnarled. The other Vehicon was visibly annoyed but didn’t press for more. He was still scowling as he turned away. His optics were narrowed slits in the dark. “Whatever. Keep it to yourself. I have places I need to be, too.”

Which seemed unlikely. He was still thankful for the jet’s admitted distraction, though. Being _out_ also beat being stuck inside with the noise. Megatron’s furious howls were continuing to echo throughout those corridors of the Citadel with a direct path from his control chamber. His personal diagnostic drone’s most recent “attempt” to purge him of his beast-mode was unsuccessful. The tantrum was likely to last hours. He gunned it along the freeway until most of the gargantuan structure was gone in his rear-view. The only sound that could bombard him out here was the scream of his own engine.

Once he was sure he was alone, Thrust took the next exit and made for the coordinates she left for him.

The building sat along the same river that fed from the hydroplant. It was part of a larger campus flanked on either side by two more less extravagant structures. All were connected by a series of roughly constructed add-ons. A statue garden with a busted fountain full of rainwater sat at the mouth of all three. Empty planters blown to pieces and scorched by laserfire told a pressing story. Not even attempts by the _humans_ to get organic life to grow on Cybertron would get by Megatron.

The Vehicon made it as far as transforming to look down the well before a rogue energy signal cropped up. The twittering beacon was coming from inside the centermost building. Gathering thunderheads swirled overhead.

“I must be the stupid or somethin,” Thrust muttered. The cyclist raised his arms and switched the safety off his turrets. “So stupid. _So_ stupid…”

The interior reception area was pitch black. Not even the emergency generator lights were on. This quadrant was far enough from the city hub that there was no need to waste resources here, power allocation or otherwise. There wouldn’t be a drone within miles to investigate the random energy flare either— a perfectly unsuspecting meeting spot. Thrust swung his headlamp torch wide to get better oriented with his surroundings. Past the reception desk was an interior courtyard even more extravagant than the statue garden outside. Three stories tall with gilded glass bottom walkways and a glass ceiling. Signage for different shops lined those high floors along the shopping mall walls.

A holo-display terminal at the greeting kiosk indicated that he could look at a map. But without power, there was nothing he could do to turn it on. Not even plugging into the terminal itself was helpful. There wasn’t a way to even download a schematic.

“Figures.”

Something shimmered against one of the second-floor walkways suspended overhead. He looked up and rolled closer. The bright green webbing had a bioluminescent glow that glistened even when his light wasn’t on it. Blackarachnia wanted to make sure he saw this one. Further down, a second web refracted light. A third was even further back than that. The energy signature held strong as those woven marks beckoned him inward.

“Yeah.” Thrust checked his weapons one last time. “Stupid.”

The trail of webs brought him deeper. The light from the entrance was gone from behind him at this point— for what little light there was to begin with. The mall was a confusing matrix of corridors merging into rotundas. Each had multiple branches that all looked the same. He kept track of the turns in relation to every pavilion they merged into, going down each path with whatever noticeable web marker closest to it. The repetitive motions continued until he found a section of the mall quartered off from the rest. Behind metal barricades and advertisements for an expansion was a segment of the strip completely gutted. Thrust hopped the low riding fence and went from polished resin floor to rough concrete. At least he had a little better traction . He continued further in and turned down the next passage. The was finally a break in the monotony as _this_ turn fed into maintenance hallway. The signage reflected under his light: EMPLOYEES ONLY.

Jetstorm was dangled in the webbing at the end of it.

Thrust panicked. The sensation welled up raw under his hood and exploded outward in a shout. He had no idea how the jet managed to follow him without him noticing, nor how he got into the mall ahead of him. The cyclist roared forward and nearly skidded out at the end of the stretch. Better traction or no, this was still an awful surface to be riding on. It wasn’t until he was up close that he realized his mistake— this wasn’t Jetstorm. The colors were wrong: solid blue with a splash of red on the tail. It was a stark contrast to Jetstorm’s clashing turquoise, yellows, and furious red banding. The wings were a base shade instead of a bleeding sunrise.

In his panic at seeing the tangled aero drone’s silhouette, he completely neglected to realize that the rogue signal had been coming from it. The dead drone had been hijacked into transmitting a custom beacon, loud enough from a distance to mask…!

_“Maximal signature: detected.”_

Blackarachnia dropped down on top of him.

There was a struggle. Thrust underestimated how light she was and nearly crushed her under his weight as he reversed, veered, and _slammed_ her into the wall behind him. Likewise, the Maximal underestimated how strong he was and wasn’t able to wrench free when his clamped servo caught one of her arms. The femme’s body was crushed between his shoulder and reinforced steel, knocking the air out of her transorganic lungs. Blackarachnia was gasping but still refusing to let go, hooking her stilettoed pedes into his seams and anchoring herself. Thrust gunned forward and did it again. Bucking and spitting, spinning on his wheel, searing rubber into the bare floor as he rammed her a second time. Then a third.

Her free claws raked him across the visor before he could do it again. He let go.

With both of her hands free, Blackarachnia was able to jab her servos into his shoulder pauldrons. Thrust _felt_ the tension before he saw the flash. Green and white on bioelectric agony, melding into numbing heat. The toxic shock knocked him for a loop and he lost his balance. Coordination gone, processor reeling, the spider flipped off his shoulders. She used her spare arachnid limbs to knock him back into the threshold of another doorway— straight into the sling of another web.

Slag.

Struggling only ensured that he was securely trapped. As his cognitive processing rebooted, he realized that he was off-kilter. Wheel completely off the floor, body angled sideways, one arm squared awkwardly while the other was akimbo—

“Put him down,” he sneered. Fighting against his senses to stop the room from spinning was impossible.

 _That_ caught her off guar. “I’m sorry?”

“The aero drone.” Thrust leered. “In the web. Put him _down.”_

She obliged, but not without hesitation. Maybe she was concerned that releasing the empty shell would benefit him in some way. Once she was sure that the drone _was_ permanently offline as she thought, she touched the webbing. The surface flickered in response to her presence. Whatever molecular bonding allowed its glue-surface to stick was disrupted. Its surface glittered. The lines went slack as their strength failed, and the drone collapsed in a crumpled heap on the floor. Thrust felt even worse looking at it now than before, and not as a result of the nausea.

Blackarachnia’s face softened. “So, you still have your honor.”

“I just don’t like lookin’ at one of my own guys being strung up, is all. Empty shell or otherwise doesn’t matter.” Thrust glared, catching her in the furious light of his headlamp. “Nothin’ honorable about sneaking around in the dark.”

“I couldn’t exactly set up shop where any of the other Maximals might find us.” She moved in closer, holding her arms out. It was a placating gesture. “I didn’t want to risk being interrupted again.”

The first time had been at the spark extraction site. The Maximals dropping in on them had been good timing, though— he might not have had the sense to get out of the building before the place blew sky high. The second had Nightscream swooping in to throw him off balance during… whatever the frag the Maximals were up to that day. Out causing trouble and blowing stuff up for no reason. If there was an ulterior motive, he had no idea what it might have been. The third was with Jetstorm coming in to accuse him of fraternizing— which wasn’t far from the truth. The jet was short-sighted when he was annoyed, but he definitely wasn’t dumb enough to fall for Thrust’s “stringin’ her along” bluff.

“What makes you think I don’t have backup?”

“You don’t,” Blackarachnia said. She reached out. “No one followed you. I was watching”

Thrust winced away. He hated himself for that moment of weakness, but the widow didn’t call him out on it. Her digits grazed the web. The solution binding him in place faltered. Gravity allowed him to fall away from its surface as if he hadn’t been stuck at all. Unfortunately, the angle of his attachment caused him to land on the outer wall of his wheel. He collapsed onto his side, still fighting the residual shocks of toxic electricity tilting the room downward. Thrust had to resist the urge to smack the Maximal on her hand as hard as he could when she offered to help him up.

“Hands _off,_ spider lady.”

She helped him up anyways. She stayed by his side until he stopped swaying, then took a step back.

“What makes you think _Jetstorm_ doesn’t know where I am?” Thrust was still irritated. “He minds his own business worse than you do. Might as well get your spark ripped out again. Three times is a charm.”

She rolled her optics and turned her back on him, starting down the hall. He had half the mind to shoot her right there and then— which wasn’t smart enough to do what it was preaching. Part of him was only angry that she would dismiss him so casually. The other was angry that she had dismissed Jetstorm’s tenacity to ignore someone’s privacy. It was a matter of principle. Instead of pumping her full of lead, he rolled after her. Stupid.

A downward glance at the battered drone was enough reminder _why_ he didn’t bring Jetstorm with him. As much as he knew the jet could right and well handle himself, Blackarachnia was a dangerous Maximal. He was lucky that she was after him for… non-violent reasons. Jetstorm _alone_ might not have been so lucky. He wondered if Jetstorm ever looked into the face of a slain cycle drone and saw what he saw in slain aero drones.

(No. He wouldn’t have.)

(Jetstorm didn’t care about Thrust in the same way Thrust did back, and the bike damn well knew it.)

(Stupid.)

“Hey.” Blackarachnia was looking back at him. “You coming?”

“Sure.” Thrust wrenched his sights off the drone. His memory superimposed Jetstorm’s image on top of it, making the thought worse. “Comin.”

They made their way to the back of the building to a section that had been gutted in its entirety. Enclosure tarping was draped along the bare walls with rolls of unused pipes and dissembled scaffolding. More renovations had been underway in this side of the mall when the virus took everyone out. It was strange to see where everything had been left— put down as if everything was still _normal_ , only for these items to never be touched again. An empty energon cube next to a human’s coffee mug balanced precariously on the edge of a crate. A darkened datapad set out on another, with its stylus beside it. A safety notification poster that was only half hung.

Seeing what had been manipulated since Megatron’s takeover was easy. For one, the bed was definitely not supposed to be there. Neither were the soft-lit bulb lamps.

Blackarachnia turned around and into him, pressing her mouth into the side of his vents.

Thrust turned into it. Then he turned straight back out when he realized what was happening. He froze.

“Silverbolt?”

There was no webbing against his back, but he might as well have been snared a second time. Thrust’s kinetics locked and the Vehicon found himself immobile by his own insecurity. “I don’t know.”

“You remembered before. You just have to keep trying.” Her voice was soft as she continued to push into him. The heat of her spark pushed past her armor and into his own chest. “You believed in me when I was a Predacon— now let me be the one who believes in _you.”_

The motivational talk was appreciated. That being said, the word _Predacon_ offset something in his spark. It was a worse feeling than being stuck in that memory she had helped surface before. The gazes of her and the other Maximals looking down on him, unhappy to see him… “Maybe you shouldn’t.”

Blackarachnia was working herself into a rhythm that must have been familiar to her. The fluidity of her motions was a little too precise to be anything but. She kissed along his jawplate, close to the back of his head, and then worked her way back to the front. She ducked under his helmet and peppered the underside. Thrust raised his helm despite himself, exposing his neck supports and the vital lining within. Stupid. _So_ stupid, but the attention was… addicting.

(He never could have gotten this out of Jetstorm.)

Thrust’s vocalizer was still buzzing when he felt the femme purring into his throat.

Her voice was a whisper. Her thin servos trailed higher, hooking against his shoulders. “You remember _this_ , then.”

He moaned again without intending to, causing her to laugh. Playful. Affectionate. She _meant_ it.

(He was _never_ going to get this out of Jetstorm.)

“Silverbolt?”

He seized her around the waist and yanked her close, crushing their chests together. Her body tensed in reflex but didn’t stay that way for long. He pressed his vents into the side of her head and she leaned into it. Any awkwardness remaining in their meld came from how hard he had started shaking. Even if he wasn’t a very good kisser, her enthusiasm to help him along made up for it. His internal temperature ticked higher as his fans ran colder to compensate. Condensation broke out on his armor. The Vehicon rocked into the Maximal and she returned the motion in kind. 

The smoke in his vocalizer coiled. “Yes.”

Moonlight eventually found its way past the tarps, streaming its way through and casting shadows. Thrust was in a haze when he let the spider have at his neck again, rolling his helmet up and back. The femme wasn’t Jetstorm, but _she_ wanted him. If he really was Silverbolt, that should have been enough reason to give this a chance. Trust was a rare commodity in the Spark War. Having a taste of it had him hooked.

In the glow, something flickered in his vision. Webbing. Translucent or not, its invisible outline was caught against the moonbeams. There were dozens of them. Along the walls, strung between objects, cradling the whole width of the [parlour](https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/the-spider-and-the-fly/) in its dangerous silk. The largest of them was woven against the ceiling. The intricate latticework of this enormous web made him realize that this hideaway was less of that and more of a predator’s nest.

Then there was a draft as the rain finally came. As the swaying tarps were drawn towards the open windows in the downdraft, he caught the outline of a spark extractor hidden neatly next to one of them.

Yeah.

Stupidity aside, he _really_ should have told Jetstorm where he was going.


	16. Take Me To Church

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thrust makes Jetstorm think about religion… which was a mistake. Jetstorm has zero chill. 
> 
> When a spark goes to return the Well, what might happen to a rogue shell program left behind? 
> 
> CONTENT WARNING: they are definitely (not tastefully) banging.

Jetstorm was _not_ a spiritual person.

Emotionally, there were just certain things he wasn’t capable of. Maybe he could have been, but dedicating the time to explore himself that way sounded boring _._ Jetstorm _knew_ what he was— he didn’t need self-imposed introspection to tell him what he already knew. He was violent. He was mean with a razor edge streak for cruelty and loved every second of it. He was willing to cheat and lie his way to the top of the Spark War’s player hierarchy to have the best vantage point of any loser stuck crawling on the ground… and yes, that was going to include Nightscream soon enough. Self-repair only worked as long as the damaged limbs affected were still attached. Jetstorm intended to tear the kid’s wings _straight off_ the next time he got his claws on him.

Thrust scowled. “Couldn’t you just shoot him? That sounds… nasty.”

 _“Nasty_ is exactly the point, sweetspark.” Jetstorm flexed his talons and roared his engine. The jet ascended higher on his antigravs, his very own pedestal of air. “Nothing about _me_ is supposed to be anything less.”

“You were born sick.”

“But I love it.”

Less was more when it came to interactions with the Maximals. Mouth off _just_ enough to incense the local wildlife, then tear them to pieces when they were close enough. Wash and repeat as many times as necessary. You could make more of an impact on your enemies when you were blasting them with plasma instead of words. The same idea applied on any inward analysis you might have with yourself. Why resort to reflection when you could solve your problems by force? Megatron might have been Cybertron’s tyrant, but Jetstorm was the king of his own dominion laid before him. If there was a wall he wanted gone? He would blast a hole through it. If he needed some entertainment? He could race the skies to his core’s content. If he willed for something? He _took_ it.

Jetstorm was capable of anything. Except when he wasn’t. Because emotionally, there were just certain things he wasn’t capable of.

The First Church of Primus had its largest chapel in Dodecahex. It was the second largest city on the planet next to Cybertropolis, and the clergy itself had been ordained by a certain [ex-Decepticon Seeker](https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Sunstorm_\(G1\)). The building had been levelled in the early stages of Megatron’s takeover, but that wasn’t the part of the story that mattered. The congregation worshipped Primus, and the Allspark by extension: the conduit to the Matrix and the Well beyond. The whole mess served as the melting pot of the _‘til all are one_ nonsense that Primal sometimes went off about. The Oracle must have had something to do with it for him to care so much. According to doctrine, the spark of every Transformer supposedly went there when they died. Assimilation into some fantastical _whole_ was apparently every Cybertronian’s wet dream.

Jetstorm didn’t get it. He didn’t _need_ to get it, because he didn’t _care_.

Then Thrust said something that utterly ruined him. “What do you think might happen to us if _we_ die?”

Jetstorm was cracked. The king found himself knocked off his throne, clear out of the sky, and face first into a wall that he had no hope to move on his own. Sheer force alone would never be enough. Still, the idea of simply ignoring it wasn’t an option for him. He was a master of his own environment. Too long he had gone with the mindset that he could solve all his own problems with a precisely-aimed gun. The notion of leaving this well enough alone couldn’t be tolerated. _Wouldn’t_. He was _not_ going to go up or around or under this damn wall. He was going to go straight through it. Somehow.

He needed an answer. Except no amount of threatening, theoretical bullying or otherwise, could wrench that answer free. Not without someone to give it to him. Jetstorm couldn’t take an answer by force when none existed.

What _might_ happen to him if he died?

“I don’t care,” Jetstorm said. It was the shrine to the ultimate lie through his vocalizer codec. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

Thrust dropped the subject, and Jetstorm outwardly pretended to do the same… all while he staked that wall for hours. Hours turned into days. Then it was weeks. The longer it took for the aerial Vehicon to try and come up with an explanation, the more that wall loomed. Its existential shadow crept further and darker over him.

This concept of a higher power beyond Megatron’s influence was a little much to bear when you took into consideration the nature of Primal’s crusade— and the nature of Jetstorm’s own being. The major problem here was that there technically _was_ an answer, because the Well was already proven to exist. Not even humans could boast that their own versions of the afterlife were real. Cybertronians _could_. Those in communion with the Matrix had come back with knowledge passed on from the Well. Other Transformers throughout history had been revived from its depths entirely.

The issue at hand was that all those Cybertronians had something Jetstorm didn’t: his own spark. The one borrowed under his chassis was Wellbound in the way that any spark would be, but he was not… that. His shell program was the part of him that made him what he was, programmed meanness and all.

Could he even be considered a Transformer?

Who was a Cybertronian without their own soul?

What _would_ happen to him if he died?

Jetstorm couldn’t stop thinking about it. He _agonized_. The Vehicon hordes were mindless machines that worked on remote puppetry. The only thing separating him from his own drones was a “functioning” mind in his shell program. If you took that away, what did you have? You had a shell program that was supposedly only a little more advanced than what technology allowed for the time, and a spark that wasn’t even really _him_. Jetstorm had repressed enough thoughts about sparing the Maximals to know that last part.

He hated it. He _hated_ feeling he had lost his ability to be capable. His confidence was gone.

(There was a worse thought, as well.)

(So far, the consensus from the Maximals was that their sparks were still _theirs_ , but that the Vehicon shell programs inflicted… corruption.)

(What if that was true?)

(Megatron’s programming prowess was not to be underestimated. His personal diagnostic drone was a “sophisticated” artificial intelligence, irritating personality notwithstanding… but what if his own shell program only gave him the _illusion_ that he was “Jetstorm” as a person? What if he was just a corrupted version of the Maximal spark he held?)

(What if he as _himself_ wasn’t real?)

(What about _Thrust?)_

(What would _happen to them if they died?)_

(For the first time in his life, Jetstorm was terrified. For himself _and_ for Thrust.)

The wall was too much. Its height was too imposing and it was beginning to fall. Jetstorm had no choices left in how he could respond. For the first time in his too-short life, he fled from his problems and hid behind his crumbling bravado. Feigning ignorance of his own mortality was the only way Jetstorm could hope to survive living with his own thoughts… and ignoring that kind of existential dread was way easier when you were getting your processor fragged out.

In an abandoned church.

On the steps leading up to the altar.

Underneath an imposing statue of the… Allspark? Was _that_ what that hideous sculpture was supposed to be?

Thrust grunted and glanced up, only half-paying attention. “I think so?”

Wow! Kinky _and_ awful! Each of those things basically cancelled themselves out! Jetstorm was right back to where he started! Horrible! He hated this!

The other Vehicon general must have been able to tell. “You wanna move?”

“I _will_ tear out your t-cog if you stop living up to your namesake, biker boy.”

Thrust mumbled something into his throat. The words were incomprehensible under the sound of their own interfacing. The cycle swivelled their arrays together and went back to work, using an arm to keep himself braced on the steps.

Jetstorm tried to focus on not focusing. Again, it was another concept that caved in on itself out— bad luck for him. Any charge that might have been building in his port felt like it had sizzled out. Nothing was a worse libido killer than his own wandering processor. The statue of the Allspark was an ominous monolith over the heads. The solid titanium cube tilted on its axis, mounted on a rectangular podium that the apostil must have been built around. No way you could have gotten something in _that_ big in through the front doors. Cybertropolis was no Dodecahex, but its own First Church of Primus remained an impressive structure. It stretched as tall as the skyscrapers built around it to encompass several stories. A combination of crystal and steel support pillars held its mass aloft in practicality and decoration. Intricate stained windows sat on top of ironwork fastenings that arched to dwarf any congregation within. The engineers commissioned in its design made use of the vertical layout by mounting stories of pews in theater styled seating.

Now here he was, laid bare in front of the whole lot. Even with a gutted audience of those missing starving faithful, it was a little… much. Sins withstanding.

“This was _your_ idea.” Thrust was better at reading him than he gave the bike credit. “You sure you don’t wanna move? We can find a closet or somethin.”

Jetstorm revved angrily. He bucked in defiance and nearly tossed the bike clear off.

“Fragger! Forget I even asked…”

Jetstorm hated that he couldn’t relax and wanted to blame the spark he was lugging. _It_ understood that it was supposed to find peace in a place like this. The colors from the neon streetlights bleed through the windows to fill its heat with comfort. Jetstorm felt it as a physical sensation that burned deep. He _loathed_ having to endure its sentimental pining. Maybe he could have admitted that he was even a little grief stricken… but emotionally, there were just certain things he wasn’t capable of. The Well was in his spark’s future. Someday it would get to become part of the All Are One whether he wanted it to or not, and the shell program that gave him his qualities would be left behind. Any answer to what might come next was still hidden behind that wall, swelling higher and higher in the dark of a deathless death—

Thrust muttered something again.

“Say what?”

The cyclist grunted, either annoyed that Jetstorm hadn’t heard him or struggling to sit up. The latter was more likely. Thrust almost slipped on the velvet lining of the stairs as he repositioned his arms to brace himself higher. Not having a set of feet might do that to a guy.

Thrust leaned up to press their foreheads together. “Look at me.”

Jetstorm glanced at him. The direct optic-contact was startling enough to make his gaze wander straight back out, but the smaller Vehicon hooked his arm around Jetstorm’s waist and _yanked._ His attention was forced back.

The orange-yellow glow from Thrust’s optical display was warm. “Stop. Look at me. I mean it.”

For the first time since starting the interface, Jetstorm looked at him— _really_ looked at him. Their sights caught and locked in. It was amazing the kind of effect that the bike could have on him. Calming. Jetstorm felt the tension in his chassis settle and his valve rolling stronger. He was feeling himself starting to enjoy the frag again as he was forced to hone on something other than his own thoughts. Lubrication resumed. His claws dug trenches in the velvet carpet. Thrust pistoned his spike and his valve took the whole length. A moan was wrenched out of his vocalizer. 

“Better?”

“Whose idea was this, again?” It was a poor deflection. Jetstorm hoped he could re-establish whatever credibility he might still have. Some goading might mask whatever insecurity Thrust may have recognized. “Let’s break into an apartment next time. These stairs are— aah…! Hmm… killing me.”

(Ouch.)

Thrust hummed. The smaller mech leaned in to puff warm air along his jaw. Then he hooked his arms around Jetstorm’s back and used the weight of his body to pin the him down.

He whispered in his audial a few cycles later. “I’m glad you’re mine.”

Jetstorm was finally able to let go, committing himself to something other than his own anxieties. He wasn’t a spiritual person, but by Primus, he was lucky enough to have at least one thing going for him. Knowing he belonged somewhere was enough to convince him that he might be okay. Even if it was only with one other person, the _only_ All Are One absolute he needed was alone with Thrust.

When the time came, they would find a way through that wall. Bringing the world down by force was a little easier with an extra set of guns.

“Still not going out of my way to wander into another church again,” Jetstorm murmured.

Thrust shuddered, more than halfway along to his overload. “Me neither. [Amen to that](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td2bsJIaC5M).”


	17. Not So Subtle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rattrap can’t help but notice that Jetstorm is as transparent as they come, even if the Vehicon doesn’t realize it.
> 
> Continued from the AU where Jetstorm accepts Cheetor’s offer to join the Maximals during Fallout (2x01). Takes place after Optimus has been revived by the Oracle. Thrust might be on board now, but Rattrap might need more convincing.

He wanted to think that he was good at reading people.

There was no denying that the Beast Wars had changed them all. No one who disembarked the _Axalon_ was the same Maximal that returned for home for Cybertron on the _Delta Omega_. Whether those changes were for better or for worse was arguable. Some people we able to evolve into stronger versions of themselves— others had simply died. He wanted to think that he fell somewhere between those two camps without crossing as far as personal extinction.

“How?”

That was easy. For worse, because he could never be the same mech he once was. _Carefree_ wasn’t the right word but was close enough to serve that purpose. He had gone from being a casual infiltration and demolitions guy to a literal soldier. His original role on the exploration team was to blow up whatever got in the way of any eggheads taking samples. As much as he loved taking aim at the Preds, risking his life in an impromptu war was never in the job description. Being asked to _care_ about his teammates was never in the posting, either.

“Then why did you bother?”

It wasn’t that he _bothered_. Like being tasked to chase after the renegade _Darksyde_ and the crash on prehistoric Earth, everything that happened was a mistake. The _Axalon_ crew was such a ragtag bunch. He doubted they could have been friends without the fight with the fighting to bring them together. Having a common enemy made the bridge between co-worker to comrade less… forced. That insurance-policy to aide his own survival was fantastic, but it had its disadvantages. He went from not caring for anyone other than himself to caring too much. It lowered his guard. The second you forgot that you were in a war, those people you cared about were killed.

He had seen enough Transformers lose their lives to last a lifetime. He never wanted to [hold someone’s hand](https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Code_of_Hero) while they were dying _ever_ again.

“It’s hard to imagine how _you_ survived.”

Understanding how people worked was how he managed to make it for as long as he had. _He_ had almost died enough times to last a lifetime, but the difference between him and those friends who hadn’t was his attention to detail. Terrorsaur was a menace but was more adept in self-servicing his own ego than being a real threat. Scorponok was an idiot but had enough sense about him to craft dangerous inventions when put to task. _Tarantulus_ he had pegged as Predacon Secret Police from the start. No scientist had that kind of trigger discipline without first being a military-cop. The fact it never came up in conversation until Ravage showed up meant that Megs never found out on his own. Good ‘ol Grape Face wasn’t dim, so made for the startling realization that he had a knack for this kind of thing. He was able to recognize the subtle traits that made everyone in the Beast Wars their own with next to no effort. Learning to pick up on those details categorically could have been slated under the “for better” scope, but…

Nightscream was impatient. The kid must have been able to tell how bogus his sentimentality was. Bats had good hearing. “But _what?”_

“Nothin,” Rattrap said. “Forget I even said anything.”

In another life, he may have been able to lay claim that he became a stronger mech at the end of the Beast Wars. His great aunt Arcee had gone from being a generic soldier in the Great War into one of the most recognized Autobot heroes in history. It would have gone without saying that that kind of heroism ran in the family. From the moment that their shuttle took off for home, he was sure that he gained more of the _for better_ than lost. The Spark War ripped that notion out from underneath him. He realized that he was nothing without a gun in his hands— that projection of himself that he could aim and shoot in his own defense. In all his refined observations he never once had the hindsight to realize that his “strengths” were never earned. His ability to _notice_ was just his natural gift of intrinsic paranoia. Any magnification of his aptitude to be a stronger person after the fact only lasted for as long as he had the upgrades to talk big game. By himself, he was… nothing. Maybe even less.

Regaining his lost memories did nothing to reignite any shred of the “beast warrior” he could have branded himself as. [Tigatron once taught him](https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Call_of_the_Wild) that you could find balance with your beast and robot forms. Being reformatted had usurped the assurance that he had truly taken that lesson to spark.

Poor Stripes. He missed Tigatron.

He _really_ missed Rhinox and Dinobot.

He also missed Silverbolt. Strong, proud, brave, and smart as a sack of hammers. Out of all the players in the Beast Wars, the knightly bird-dog was the easiest to get a feel for. _That_ was someone who was able to grow into his own despite being such a noble goon from the get-go. Born unto naivety and sent tumbling headfirst into that moral epitome you could see from a mile away. Rattrap had the guy figured out within days of him joining the Maximals. Any thoughts that the “ex-Predacon” might try to cause trouble were as short-lived as trying to convince him to go to one of the more _uncouth_ clubs when they got back to Cybertropolis. Slag, he even had him pinned for fancying Blackarachnia before _any_ of the others knew!

Going on scouting patrol? Yeah, right. The spider was showing him all _sorts_ of fun stuff when no one was looking. Silverbolt was a gentleman in knight’s shining armor, but even he wasn’t immune to his own brand uncouthness.

Which was blatantly clear when his spark was put into a certain Vehicon. Speaking of which…

Jetstorm jammed his talons under the rising gap at the bottom of the door. The temporary power provision failed as the security system kicked Rattrap back out. Not good. Three backup firewalls replaced the first that had been breached. The failsafe function attempted to slam the slider shut as the lockdown reinstated. The Vehicon reacted quickly to catch the frame it with his massive servos. He heaved upward in retaliation. The inward mechanisms groaned as it fought against him. Ton after ton, met with the sheer stubbornness of the _angriest_ sack of hammers this side of Cybertron.

The jet grunted and fought to lift the door higher. “Get _in_ , rat. This isn’t light!”

“Hold ‘yer horses! I’m goin!”

“Do _not_ talk to me about animals.” Jetstorm grunted, managing to wedge the door wide enough for a small mech to slip underneath. Rattrap could tell the jet had reached his limit when his antigravs began to sputter. He couldn’t raise the door any higher without risking injury. “I never asked for a four-legged sidekick. Bad enough I’m stuck slinking around in the dark with _vermin.”_

Primus, he wished he still had legs. Rattrap unplugged himself from the wall terminal and skirted back on his wheels. He entered beast-mode. Months into being Reformatted and he was _still_ getting used to the phasing delay. The other Maximals had adjusted just fine, bipedal robot-modes and all. Whatever. Wallowing in his own aggravation wasn’t going to fix his problems.

Rattrap scuttled under the door frame into the next corridor. Jetstorm let go as his tail cleared the guillotine’s descent— _just_ barely.

“Hey! Watch it!” He shouted as the door almost crushed the tip. He snatched his poor appendage up. “Some of us want to keep our parts _attached_ , here!”

The Vehicon scoffed on the other side. The sound came through only slightly muffled. Sheesh, this guy was loud. “Hurry it up! Just being around you is giving me some kind of a rash…”

Rattrap wondered if it would be pertinent to mention the Black Plague to him, then decided against it. No need to get Cheetor worked up if Jetstorm started a hissy over being baited, fun as it might have been. Clearing the Citadel of any useful secrets took precedence now that Megatron was gone. Large sections of the building had been shut off to them since the activation of the giant floating _head_ thing just outside. As if bringing back Optimus from the dead wasn’t weird enough— never mind that it had happened twice already.

“Twice.” That was the first time that Jetstorm had spoken to him directly, excluding any instances of mid-battle jeering. Having the generals on their side still struck weird.

“Yeah. Rhinox hooked up some doohickey to bring his spark back from the other side when he died during the Beast Wars.” Rattrap shrugged. He hadn’t expected Jetstorm to start a dialogue with him that wasn’t direct insults— although one word hardly counted. “The aliens would’ve offed more of us if the Planet Buster went off for a little while longer.”

“Aliens.” Jetstorm leered. _“Aliens…?”_

Three words hardly counted, either. “What? You got a problem with aliens or somethin?”

Jetstorm said nothing. On that note, the group separated into their respective teams. Optimus, Cheetor, and Nightscream took the direct path to Megatron’s personal workshops. If there was hope to find the sparks or what plans Megatron intended for them, they could start there. Blackarachnia and Thrust were tasked with locating a way into the security wing’s weapons stockpile. _Not_ to get guns, of course— just to see if there were schematics of the building that they could use to specify its layout. The generals only had rudimentary knowledge of the levels that Megatron gave them access to. The other (large) percentage was unmapped territory that went down into the planet’s bowels for miles. Rattrap had been put with Jetstorm by virtue of being the only one who might be able to stand his backtalking. Keeping an eye on Megatron’s ex-cronies was important, and letting the two Vehicons strike off alone was out of the question. As long as one of them had the spark of one of their buddies…

Urgh.

“And don’t call me _vermin.”_ Rattrap brought himself up to his full height, scowling at nothing in the dark. “Only one of my friends was ever allowed to do that, and he sure as the Pitt isn’t _you.”_

“Fine.” Jetstorm didn’t push the topic. That struck Rattrap as strange. “Sure thing, _mouse.”_

Depthcharge. Primus, how the frag had he forgotten about _Depthcharge?_ Big, blue, and moody to boot. Jetstorm might as well have been his off-brand twink cousin. Charlie Tuna’s nickname for him had been the same. At least _mouse_ could at least be tolerated without painful memory. No more dead heroes.

“Hey!” Jetstorm rapped his massive servos on the wall. The sound echoed and nearly caused Rattrap to jump out of his own casing. The tension in his voice was still thick enough to chew through. “You still functioning in there? I asked what the holdup was!”

Right. Back to work. “Whatever.”

This side of the lockdown was pitch black. He and Jetstorm had cleared several paths throughout the Citadel’s north wing like this, although this one was particularly dark. Rattrap felt along the wall to his left until he found a ventilation hatch. Yanking the panelling free allowed him to enter the crawlspace and shuffle upwards. An awkward fit for anyone, rats included. A meter up into the aperture was where he found his first set of motherboards. He was able to use his tail-link to feel for the override module that would control the door. It was a trick that Rhinox had taught him when they had to reboot _Sentinel_ during system maintenance.

He linked up successfully, using the connector to interface with the lockdown protocol. Already he could see that he was going to be more successful. The lockdown was coded as being on the _other_ side of the threshold. Breaking in was the hard part. Telling the system to go into standby would be easier when you were already “inside” the house. Ooh, what a [fond memory](https://tfwiki.net/wiki/A_Better_Mousetrap).

“You weren’t exactly my first pick to partner with _either_ , flyboy,” Rattrap said, hoping the shaft would carry his voice well enough for a conversation. “I could’ve gone with Blackarachnia. I bet _Waspinator_ is more fun to hang out with, anyhow.”

“You couldn’t pay me enough go near the spider,” Jetstorm snapped. There was a considerable pause before he spoke back up. He sounded angrier than usual. “Don’t call him that.”

That caught Rattrap off guard. “Come again?”

“Thrust.” Jetstorm’s voice hardened. “Do not call him _Waspinator.”_

Rattrap’s ability to pick up on a person’s subtle traits hadn’t gone away. Not necessarily how to read people in their entirety… but how to see when little shifts happened. It was how he was the first to pick up that Dinobot really _did_ care about the Maximals, after a certain amount of time had passed. How he recognized the that the war had affected Rhinox to turn into the monster he became, while the others were shocked and couldn’t understand. How he recognized that Silverbolt was first starting to fraternize with Blackarachnia, and no one else—

Something in the line of code he was breaking into gave way. It fell out from under his electric probing. Magnetic locks lifted. The door audibly came open as it raised. Rattrap removed any and all remaining lockdown restrictions to finalize the hack. The freed pathway remained clear. Light from the emergency power floodlights lit the corridor, illuminating the second grate next to his head.

He watched through the slots as Jetstorm floated through. His optics were dim.

“You’re getting faster, at least,” Jetstorm muttered. He didn’t sound happy.

Rattrap poked his nose through the slots. “You okay there, Big Blue? Penny for ‘yer thoughts?”

“I’m fine.” Jetstorm glanced up at the rat and scowled. “I mean it. If I ever hear you use that _name_ to refer to Thrust again, I’ll fillet you. Got it?”

“Sure,” Rattrap said, and was surprised when he also meant it.

He underestimated his ability to wiggle back out of the crawlspace. His hips caught on the form of the vent and he was wedged snug in place. The only way to go was forward… which was an equally awkward fit. The issue was rectified by Jetstorm lending a hand. The larger Vehicon tore the vent plate off the wall and allowed Rattrap to grab his arm, dragging him out.

There was a beat as the radios came on. Cheetor’s voice came through at a crackle. “Checking in. What’s everyone’s status?”

(Tigatron would’ve been damn proud of “Little Cat.”)

“We still can’t find a diagram that we can use,” Blackarachnia said. “Megatron scrubbed everything clean that he could think of, including the security logs. Thrust thinks that he can link into one of these terminals and make a rough map by referencing security camera placements.”

Optimus was soft-spoken. “That’s highly resourceful. Good work.”

“Yeah, but it’s takin’ ages.” Thrust’s voice was low and growling. He was frustrated— not that Blackarachina would have noticed, but Rattrap sure did. Subtle shifts in tone and all that. “There’s no way to get their positions by logging in under an administrative account. I’m havin’ to do all this in a manual setting. Megatron _really_ didn’t want anyone to know what he had hidden in here.”

Nightscream snorted. “Considering that he managed to park that ship in here without you Vehiclowns noticing, that doesn’t surprise me.”

“Uh huh.” Thrust didn’t sound impressed. “Sure. _Vehiclowns.”_

Jetstorm must have been able to tell that his friend was annoyed. He keyed into the connection for himself. Surprisingly, rather than add fuel to the fire, he was ready with a redirect. _“We’re_ fine, by the way! I haven’t gotten rabies from Rattrap even once! Thanks for asking!”

There was an agreement to check back in after another thirty cycles. Before hanging up the line, Rattrap listened as Jetstorm opened a private channel. He was in close enough proximity to tell it was the network used by the generals.

“You hanging in there, biker boy?”

“Something like that. The widow stepped out to explore the rest of the space.” Thrust paused. “You?”

“Fine.”

“Check back in five? I’m not feelin’ thirty.”

“Don’t get stuck in a web in the meantime. I’m watching the clock.”

“I’ll hold you to it, Storm.”

The disconnect chime rang clear in the narrow corridor. Jetstorm sagged… then straightened himself back up when he remembered that he wasn’t alone. He snapped him back into a sneer fast enough to give a normal Transformer whiplash.

“What _are_ you looking at?”

“Nothin.” Rattrap stayed in beast-mode as he gestured ahead. “Lead the way, Jets.”

He watched as Jetstorm floated down the corridor with his weapons drawn. He might have had Silverbolt’s spark, and so much of what he was screamed the Maximal’s polar opposite… but that was only to a certain degree. The brief exchange between him and Thrust had done leagues to lessen the tension in his posture as he moved further into the dark. Silverbolt was an easy read like that, too— especially when it came to a certain spider.

For all the subtle things that Rattrap could recognize…

 _“That_ wasn’t very subtle,” he muttered. He wondered when the other Maximals would notice, too.


End file.
